# Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia - Hardcover

by **David Graeber** (Author)

**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 defined for too long 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.

### Author Biography

**David Graeber** was a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics. He was the author of _Debt:_ _The First 5,000 Years_ and _Bullshit Jobs: A Theory_, among many others books, and the coauthor with David Wengrow of the _New York Times_ bestseller _The Dawn of Everything_. He was an iconic thinker and a renowned activist, and his early efforts in Zuccotti Park made Occupy Wall Street an era-defining movement. He died on September 2, 2020

**Number of Pages:** 208

**Dimensions:** 0.84 x 8.49 x 5.61 IN

**Publication Date:** January 24, 2023

## Details

- **Price:** 27.0 USD
- **Vendor:** Books by splitShops
- **Type:** Books
- **Tags:** Books by splitShops, Shopify Collective

## Variants

| Variant | Price | Available |
|---------|-------|-----------|
| Default Title | 27.00 USD | In stock |

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- Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia - Hardcover

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