Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia by David Graeber reviewed
Michael M. Rosen
“The only rules,” Captain Jack Sparrow of the Pirates of the Caribbean series once said, “are these: what a man can do and what a man can’t do.” This tension between stricture and freedom and the codification of social norms characterizes a certain group of real-life pirates, whose motley tale the late anthropologist David Graeber tells in his final book, Pirate Enlightenment.
Graeber focused much of his legendary career on excavating the non-Western roots of some of the most putatively Euro-American political and philosophical concepts, such as democracy and individual rights. In his magisterial, counterintuitive 2021 opus, The Dawn of Everything, Graeber and co-author David Wengrow demonstrate how traditional Western historical understandings of the evolution of agriculture and modern societal structures oversimplify extremely nuanced and complicated developments. Along similar lines, in Pirate Enlightenment, a concise and elegant tract published after his untimely death, Graeber, a self-described anarchist, makes the case that long before European scholars first advanced their vision of liberal democracy, 17th-century Indian Ocean pirates and the Madagascar settlements they influenced produced relatively free and egalitarian civil societies, espousing “a profoundly proletarian version of liberation, necessarily violent and ephemeral.”
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In his final book, Graeber relates “a story about magic, lies, sea battles, purloined princesses, slave revolts, manhunts, make-believe kingdoms and fraudulent ambassadors, spies, jewel thieves, poisoners, devil worship, and sexual obsession that lies at the origins of modern freedom.” While it’s sometimes difficult to untangle fact and fiction, Graeber’s account doesn’t disappoint.
The tale begins in the 17th century as buccaneers plied the waters off the coast of Madagascar. In general, pirate ships, choked with people from a wide variety of cultures and faiths, occupying a range of social stations, constituted “perfect laboratories of democratic experiment.”
Why did the northeastern coast of Madagascar present such a congenial base for piracy? Off the coast of Africa, in the Indian Ocean, it sits at what was then the fulcrum of the spice and silk trades being plied through the Red Sea. Precious metals also traversed the naval lanes commanded by the island. Madagascar lay in an administrative twilight zone between, but not covered by, the jurisdictions of the British Royal African Company and the East India Company. And no powerful African kingdoms could be found within a thousand miles of the island’s shores.
As Westerners, Asians, and Africans made landfall, their interactions with the locals created a unique laboratory for sociopolitical experimentation. In A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pirates, a book published in 1726 by Captain Charles Johnson (widely considered a pseudonym for Daniel Defoe), the Western world is introduced to Libertalia, an idyllic section of Madagascar where all men (and even most women) were free and equal.
In fact, contemporaneous English records describe the settlement of Ambonavola as “a kind of utopian experiment, an attempt to apply the democratic principles of organization typical of pirate ships to a settled community on land.” Graeber asserts that the local Betsimisaraka Confederation were “in many ways self-conscious experiments in radical democracy” and represented “some of the first stirrings of Enlightenment political thought, exploring ideas and principles that were ultimately to be developed by political philosophers and put in practice by revolutionary regimes a century later.”
What were the interactions like between the seamen and the landlubbers?
Johnson wrote that “the Pyrates interposed, and endeavoured to reconcile all differences” between feuding natives. The Bermudan renegade Nathaniel North “decid[ed] their disputes not seldom, with that Impartiality and strict Regard to distributive Justice.” Indeed, Johnson reckoned that the “inclinations which the Pyrates shewed to peace” and “the Example they set of an amicable Way of Life” placed them in excellent standing among the natives.
A relatively egalitarian ethos permeated these settlements as well. “In any given village,” Graeber reports, “there was a Great Hall where everyone ate their midday meal together, and collective granaries where each family kept their own stock, but also a collective store any family could draw on in case of shortfall.” Communal decisions were rendered by a gathering of leaders deliberating issues of importance.
One particular leader named Ratsimilaho, himself the son of an English pirate and a Malagasy mother, governed in a proto-liberal way. The head of the Betsimisaraka Confederation, Ratsimilaho devolved authority to villages and authorized all citizens to call kabaries to discuss overturning his rulings. “Archaeologists,” Graeber notes, “find no evidence of settlement hierarchies” or that “ritual experts received any systematic recognition or privileges.” These innovations helped secure for Madagascar 30 years’ worth of peace and prosperity and “insulated the Betsimisaraka from the depredations of the slave trade.”
Women, too, enjoyed an uncommon degree of political and sexual empowerment. Oral histories eventually committed to writing reveal that, in addition to participating in kabary, Malagasy women proactively sought husbands — as well as alternatives. One text records that villagers “consider it an understood thing that if a man is not at home, the woman is free to go about to others.” And according to one legend, an unfaithful woman whose cuckolded husband tried to drown her “founded a new village on the bottom of the lake.”
“What we call ‘Enlightenment thought,’” Graeber concludes, “might have come to its full flowering in cities like Paris, Edinburgh, Konigsberg, and Philadelphia, but it was the creation of conversations, arguments, and social experiments that criss-crossed the world.” It’s unclear, of course, just how significantly the piratical experiment in liberal governance influenced any modern political philosophers or, for that matter, any other society. But in uncovering the history of coastal Madagascar, Graeber, in a final contribution to literature, shows just how universal the urge for freedom and equality truly has proven.
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Michael M. Rosen is an attorney and writer in Israel and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.