Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia

Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia - Paperback

$19.00
Sale price  $19.00 Regular price 
Skip to product information
Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia

Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia - Paperback

$19.00
Sale price  $19.00 Regular price 

Book Overview

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, which for too long has been defined 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.
ISBN9781250321879
Author David Graeber
PublisherPicador USA
GenreNews & politics and History
FormatPaperback
PublishedSeptember 2024
LanguageENG- English
Pages208
Weight1.0 lb
Target AudienceAdults
Print SizeStandard Print

1% fer Each of the Seven Seas

Every purchase sends 7% of our profits to The Ocean Cleanup. No fine print, no opt-in — just how we sail.

Whoever Ye Be, Welcome Aboard

Queer lit, music, art, philosophy, fiction — stories for every kind of soul. Come as ye are, matey.

About David Graeber

David Graeber (1961-2020) was a Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics. His bestselling books include The Dawn of Everything, cowritten with David Wengrow, and DEBT: The First 5,000 Years. He was a contributor to Harper's Magazine, The Guardian, and The Baffler.

You may also like