“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.”
