Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia

Chatty, punky, anti-everything catnip… it is good fun. It’s about pirates, after all. * Sunday Times *Engaging … the chief pleasure of Graeber’s writing is not that one always agrees with his arguments about the past. It is rather that, through a series of provocative thought experiments, he repeatedly forces us to reconsider our own ways of living in the present. Whatever happened in 18th-century Madagascar, Pirate Enlightenment implies, we could surely all do with a bit more free-thinking and egalitarianism in our own social, sexual and political arrangements. – Fara Dabhoiwala * The Guardian *Open and imaginative… Graeber is writing in a hybrid genre of poetic history, in this sense, but he is also reminding us why such hybridisation is good for us. * New Statesman *A characteristically radical re-reading of history that places the social and political experiments of pirates at the heart of the European Enlightenment. A brilliant companion volume to the best-selling Dawn of Everything. – Amitav GhoshFeisty, heroic … a highly original thinker and a wonderful writer. – Peter Frankopan * New York Times *A genius… blazingly original, stunningly wide-ranging, impossibly well read. * The Atlantic *A thinker who revolutionises the way we see the world and helps us reimagine the things we once took for granted. * New Statesman *PRAISE FOR THE DAWN OF EVERYTHING: Iconoclastic and irreverent … an exhilarating read. – David Priestland * The Guardian *Pacey and potentially revolutionary … This is more than an argument about the past, it is about the human condition in the present. – Bryan Appleyard * Sunday Times *Blazing with iconoclastic rebuttals to conventional wisdom. Full of fresh thinking, it’s a pleasure to read and offers a bracing challenge on every page. – Simon Sebag Montefiore * BBC History *

David Graeber was a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics. He is the author of, among others, The Dawn of Everything- A New History of Humanity, Debt- The First 5,000 Years, Bullshit Jobs- A Theory, and Pirate Enlightenment, and was a contributor to Harper’s Magazine, the Guardian, and the Baffler. An iconic thinker and renowned activist, his early efforts helped to make Occupy Wall Street an era-defining movement. He died on 2 September 2020.

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