Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia
One of The New Yorker’s Best Books of 2023
The final book from David Graeber, the iconic intellectual, activist, and co-author of the 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 European empire.
In graduate school, David Graeber conducted ethnographic field research in Madagascar, producing what would eventually become a doctoral thesis on the island’s magic, slavery, and politics. During this time, he encountered the Zana-Malata, an ethnic group made up of mixed descendants of the many…
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January 24, 2023DAVID GRAEBER was a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics. He is the co-author (with David Wengrow) of The Dawn of Everything, author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years and Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, and was a contributor to Harper’s Magazine, The Guardian, and The Baffler. An iconic thinker and renowned activist, his early efforts in Zuccotti Park made Occupy Wall Street an era-defining movement. He died on September 2, 2020.
The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World...
David Graeber; edited by Nika Dubrovsky; foreword by Rebecca Solnit
The Dawn of Everything
David Graeber and David Wengrow
Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia
David Graeber