Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia

By: David Graeber

Narrated by: Roger Davis

Long-listed, New Yorker Best Books of the Year, 2023

"Narrator Roger Davis, who earned first-class honors in media and anthropology, puts his training to good use to lead listeners through 17th- and 18th-century Malagasy history."—Library Journal

The final posthumous work by the coauthor of the major New York Times bestseller The Dawn of Everything.

Pirates have long lived in the realm of romance and fantasy, symbolizing risk, lawlessness, and radical visions of freedom. But at the root of this mythology is a rich history of pirate societies—vibrant, imaginative experiments in self-governance and alternative social formations at the edges of the European empire.

In graduate school, David Graeber conducted ethnographic field research in Madagascar for his doctoral thesis on the island’s politics and history of slavery and magic. During this time, he encountered the Zana-Malata, an ethnic group of mixed descendants of the many pirates who settled on the island at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia, Graeber’s final posthumous book, is the outgrowth of this early research and the culmination of ideas that he developed in his classic, bestselling works Debt and The Dawn of Everything (written with the archaeologist David Wengrow). In this lively, incisive exploration, Graeber considers how the protodemocratic, even libertarian practices of the Zana-Malata came to shape the Enlightenment project defined for too long as distinctly European. He illuminates the non-European origins of what we consider to be “Western” thought and endeavors to recover forgotten forms of social and political order that gesture toward new, hopeful possibilities for the future.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2023 David Graeber (P)2023 Macmillan Audio

Critic reviews

"A tour de force of anthropological scholarship and an important addition to Malagasy history . . . Certain to be controversial, but all the more important for that."—Kirkus

“Pirates captured the imagination of writers and readers centuries ago, and David Graeber reveals why. He has produced one of the most fascinating, original, and altogether brilliant books ever written about these unruly outlaws.”—Marcus Rediker, author of Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age

“Daring, carefully speculative, and intellectually ambitious: all qualities that we had come to expect of the late David Graeber. Pirate Enlightenment is a splendid example of Graeber’s transformative and convincing case that the Enlightenment was a cosmopolitan and plebian concoction, fabricated far from the European centers of Enlightenment thought.”—James C. Scott

One of the most fun historical accounts ever

I am on a kick of reading up on pirate history and I like that this book is very singular in its focus on the experimental democracies of Madagascar and how they were influenced by pirate ship democracy and how pirate and sea-faring culture was also influenced by the earthy and cosmopolitan culture that evolved on this island. I like that it goes into great detail about specific legendary pirates and distills the probable fact from the presumable fiction as well as going into detail about rituals, etiquette, politic, and other customs that can be traced through reliable documentation of the time.
The reader’s voice and random use of dynamic and inflection took some getting used to and required constant adjustment of volume while listening.

Graeber doing what he does best

Presents a fantastic idea of (one of ) the roots of democratic ideals. Personally heard nothing wrong with the narration, inflections and tones, all spot on.

Fun pirate stuff and thoughtful

Nice and breezy and makes you relook at the democratic ideals of these swashbucklers. Yes

Weird narration. Decent (audio)book.

Odd choice of narrator, given that Graeber was a NYer (although he taught in Britain). And he speaks like an A.I. Michael Caine, with pauses in unusual places.

Thesis is interesting, lots of digressions. Worth the trip, if you can bear the narrator.

A fun historical analysis of Pirate political systems

Well, this was not the book I was expecting, David Graber, once again, fuses, scholarship, and political theory to build a compelling case for the importance of pirate, political systems on Madagascar. Well, the book is really narrow in scope, the pirate settlements along the coast of northern Madagascar, as well as the complicated family alliances make for a compelling listen.

Meh. Lesser Graeber

Not much that blows the mind or opens up alternate, counter culture versions of past society. Was recommended and wished I’d spent my credit on something else.

bad audio

audio is really poor quality, sounding very harsh and cheap. Not fun to listen to

the audio is terrible

Who narrated this? it was obviously a machine. Random words are sharply unnaturally emphasized. it is awful. The book is really good.