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How Enlightened Were the Pirates of Madagascar?

In his last book, the iconoclastic anthropologist David Graeber considers evidence that maritime outlaws created utopian political communities on the island in the Indian Ocean.

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By Peter Frankopan

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PIRATE ENLIGHTENMENT: Or the Real Libertalia , by David Graeber

“Pirate Enlightenment,” a slim, feisty book by the late anthropologist and political activist David Graeber, was sparked by field research he conducted in Madagascar more than 30 years ago. His travel to the island in the southwest Indian Ocean had been inspired in turn by a desire to investigate ideas about divine kingship that had been so eloquently discussed by the anthropologist Maurice Bloch. While conducting his own research, Graeber learned that Madagascar had served as a crucial base for Caribbean pirates and their descendants. At the time of his death in 2020 at age 59, he had returned to the subject that had fascinated him as a young man; “Pirate Enlightenment” is the result.

Madagascar has long played an important role in the histories of the Indian Ocean world, as is clear from the fusion of African, Arab, Persian and Indian influences on the island’s culture, language and belief systems. Early European visitors described their bemusement at finding even wider connections. There were people on the island, one author noted, who “celebrate and refrain from work on Saturday, not Friday like the Moors,” and who retain “the names of Moses, of Isaac, of Jacob and of Noah.” The Zafi-Ibrahim, as they referred to themselves, were evidently Jews, perhaps “descended from the oldest families of Ishmaelites from before the Babylonian Captivity.”

The opening up of trans-Atlantic shipping in the decades that followed Columbus’s crossing in 1492 galvanized these connections further still. The integration of the Americas into global trading networks offered plenty of opportunities for states, monarchs and investors to become rich. Those who acquired the skills to sail ships through challenging seas but were resistant to seeing the bulk of the rewards flow to others were often tempted to take matters into their own hands. “There were all sorts of pirates,” Graeber writes, including a Madagascar community descended from buccaneers whose members called themselves the “Zana-Malata,” literally “children of the Malata,” the latter a term derived from “mulatto.”

Graeber may be best known in the United States as the co-author with David Wengrow of the surprise best seller “ The Dawn of Everything ,” which aimed to topple much conventional wisdom about the evolution of human societies, including the European genesis of Enlightenment ideals of freedom and equality. It’s no wonder that in “Pirate Enlightenment” he sets out to explore the impact that apparently egalitarian pirate communities and their “rebel culture” may have had on local social, economic and political development.

Madagascar, Graeber writes, was the “ideal base” for launching piratical raids, both because of its location at a key point between the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, which made it a perfect place to replenish food, water and labor (coerced or otherwise), and because it “existed in a sort of legal gray zone,” beyond the reach of trade corporations like the East India Company and the Royal African Company. By the end of the 17th century, Madagascar had become a haven for pirates, including, perhaps, the English-born Henry Avery and the vast wealth he secured after capturing two heavily laden Mughal ships. According to one account, Avery realized during the raid that the jewels covering the furniture onboard were not cut glass, but diamonds. That, at least, was the rumor that reached Europe.

Information that flowed from Madagascar back to Europe during this period was often of dubious quality. As Graeber tells it, stories swirled of “a burgeoning new kingdom dominating the southwest Indian Ocean, with thousands of pirates and confederates of all nations, with a vast fleet of warships, seeking allies.” Some sources, among them the author Daniel Defoe, urged the British government to normalize relations with the “newly emerging power.” Quick-thinking charlatans popped up across Europe posing as Avery’s envoys, offering to sign treaties with royal courts in Britain, France, Sweden, Russia and beyond.

In fact, while we know Avery existed, no one knew what became of him after he seized his prizes, though his men could be found scattered from North American colonies to Ireland. Six eventually met justice in the form of the hangman’s noose (an effort to appease the Mughal government). Nevertheless, Madagascar captured the imagination of Europeans as a refuge for renegades and criminals, but also as an exotic island paradise blessed with a lovely climate and fertile soils and, not least, as a place where fortune favored the brave.

Graeber’s challenge is to try to make sense of a set of sources that are unreliable or obtuse, and often written either many decades after events they describe or many thousands of miles away — or both. Much of what exists in the historical record owes a great deal to wishful thinking, or to caricatures designed to impress or amuse readers. According to one author, a pirate settler in Madagascar named John Plantain, known as “the King of Ranter Bay,” was born “of English parents, who took care to bestow on him the best Education they themselves were possess’d of: which was to curse, swear and blaspheme, from the time of his first learning to speak.”

If this sounds fanciful, it gives you a sense of the kind of material that Graeber is wrestling with. The dearth of local primary sources doesn’t help. It’s difficult to get a sense of Ambonavola, reportedly a main center for non-Malagasy pirate settlers on the island. Welcome to Graeber’s hall of mirrors: In popular accounts in 18th-century Britain, Ambonavola was conceived of as “a kind of utopian experiment” where a new state was being built, lorded over not by kings but by strange, democratically-minded outsiders who had rejected European society and its norms. That sounds interesting — the “pirate enlightenment” of the title. And yet today, no one knows for sure whether such a state existed. Or what this enlightenment consisted of, or for whom.

Given these shortcomings, Graeber is heroic to try to square a series of circles. He does not hide from the problems, admitting that “99 percent” of the evidence that might help him reconstruct a convincing picture “has been permanently lost to us.” When it comes to understanding how the island’s initially diverse groups and languages came to share a more uniform Malagasy culture, as he admits, “we have no idea how this happened.”

The result is that Graeber’s hypotheses rest on the thinnest of air. The second half of his book is about the rise of the Betsimisaraka Confederation, a “political entity” that grew powerful in the first half of the 18th century under a charismatic leader by the name of Ratsimilaho. At least that is what sources written decades later claim, though these also say Ratsimilaho was sent to school in England as a boy by his pirate father.

Ratsimilaho’s rule, Graeber says, was a “masculine riposte to the self-assertion of women who allied themselves with pirates.” He argues that ambitious local women, including many successful merchants, had been able to get pirates to concede power, because, although the men brought treasures with them, when they arrived they had no social or cultural capital. When women were excluded from kabary — village assemblies where community members sat around gravely smoking tobacco and drinking honey wine — it constituted a provocation in a world where “local women clearly had the upper hand.”

David Graeber was a highly original thinker and a wonderful writer. Most of all he was someone who sought out challenging problems and set about trying to solve them. In this case, he may well have been right about the ways he believed pirates influenced the culture of Madagascar, but as he admits there is simply not enough evidence to know for sure.

Peter Frankopan is a professor of global history at Oxford. His latest book, “The Earth Transformed: An Untold History,” will be published in April.

PIRATE ENLIGHTENMENT: Or the Real Libertalia | By David Graeber | 175 pp. | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | $27

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The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow review – inequality is not the price of civilisation

An archaeologist and an anthropologist dismantle received wisdom about the way early societies operated

H istory matters. As we debate statues and slavery and dispute the role of empire, we have become accustomed to constant sparring over the past. But there is one branch of history that has, so far, remained above the fray: the story of our very early past, the “dawn” of humanity. For the anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow, this consensus is a problem. As they argue in this iconoclastic and irreverent book, much of what we think we know of this distant era is actually a myth – indeed it is our origin myth, a modern equivalent of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden. At its core is a story of the rise of civilisation and, with it, the rise of the state. Like all origin myths, this narrative has enormous power, and its reach and resilience are preventing us from thinking clearly about our present crises.

This myth, they argue, can be found on the shelves of every high-street and airport bookshop, in super-sellers such as Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens , Jared Diamond’s The World Until Yesterday and Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order . All of these books share a common assumption: as societies become larger, more complex, wealthy and “civilised”, they inevitably become less equal. Early humans, it is said, lived like the foragers of the Kalahari, in small, mobile bands that were casually egalitarian and democratic. But this primitive idyll or Hobbesian hell (views differ) disappeared with settlement and farming, which required the management of labour and land. The emergence of early cities, and ultimately states, demanded even steeper hierarchies, and with them the whole civilisational package – leaders, administrators, the division of labour and social classes. The lesson, then, is clear: human equality and freedom have to be traded for progress.

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Graeber and Wengrow see the origins of this “stagist” narrative in Enlightenment thought, and show that it has been so persistently appealing because it can be used by radicals as well as liberals. For early liberals such as Adam Smith, it was a positive story that could be deployed to justify the rise in inequality brought by commerce and the structure of the modern state. But a variation on the story, put forward by philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, proved just as useful to the left: in the “state of nature” man was originally free, but with the coming of agriculture, property and so on, he ended up in chains. And Friedrich Engels fused Rousseau’s “noble savage” fable with Darwinist evolutionary ideas, to produce a more optimistic Marxist narrative of historical progress: primitive communism is superseded by private property and states, and then by a modern, proletarian communism.

It is this tale – in both its liberal and more radical forms – which Graeber and Wengrow seek to dismantle using recent anthropological and archaeological research. Excavations in Louisiana, for example, show that in about 1600BC Native Americans built giant earthworks for mass gatherings, drawing people from hundreds of miles around – evidence that shatters the notion that all foragers lived simple, isolated lives.

Meanwhile, the so-called “agricultural revolution” – the Neolithic Faustian bargain when humanity swapped egalitarian simplicity for wealth, status and hierarchy – simply didn’t happen. The shift from foraging to agriculture was slow and patchy; much of what has been thought of as farming was actually small-scale horticulture, and perfectly compatible with flat social structures. Similarly, the rise of cities did not necessitate kings, priests and bureaucrats. Indus valley settlements such as Harappa (c2600BC) show no signs of palaces or temples and instead suggest dispersed, not concentrated power. While Graeber and Wengrow are open about the very limited evidence and the disputes over its interpretation, they build a compelling case.

Yet they reserve particular scorn for another myth: the assumption that the “savage” was stupid as well as noble. In an age that worships the tech-gods of Silicon Valley, it is tempting to believe that we are more sapiens than our distant ancestors. But 17th-century Jesuit missionaries were exasperated to discover the intellectual agility of the Native American Wendat people in resisting conversion; indeed, they showed themselves more eloquent than the “shrewdest citizens and merchants in France”. This sophistication was attributed to the Wendats’ democratic councils, which were “held almost every day in the Villages, and on almost all matters” and “improve[d] their capacity for talking”. These skills and habits, Graeber and Wengrow suggest, actually made so-called primitive peoples more truly “political animals” than we are now – engaged in the day-to-day business of organising their communities rather than impotently tweeting about it.

Graeber was, until his death last year at the age of 59, among the world’s most famous anarchists and an intellectual leader of the Occupy Wall Street movement (now celebrating its 10th anniversary). The Dawn of Everything certainly follows a long tradition of anti-statist anthropology. An early example was Mutual Aid (1902) by the anarchist geographer Prince Kropotkin, which provided an alternative to the fashionable evolutionary histories of his era, and defended “savage” peoples against the harsh judgments of imperialists and Marxists alike. And in his 1972 essay The Original Affluent Society, the American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins wondered whether the Kalahari foragers, with their two- to four-hour working day, were really so much worse off than the nine-to-five office or factory worker.

Importantly, Graeber and Wengrow do not idealise a particular “golden age”; we are not being urged to embrace a Palaeolithic lifestyle. They stress the sheer variety and hybridity of early human societies – hierarchical and non-hierarchical, equal in some respects and not in others. Indeed, peoples like the Cherokee or the Inuit even alternated between authoritarianism and democracy depending on the season. Nevertheless, the authors make their sympathies clear: they admire experimentation, imagination and playfulness, as well as mastery of the art of not being governed, to use historian James C Scott’s term.

The Dawn of Everything is an exhilarating read, but it’s unclear how effectively it makes the case for anarchism. Sceptical readers will be driven to ask: if states in their current form are really so unnecessary, why have they become so dominant across the world? To address this, Graeber and Wengrow would have needed to offer a much fuller account of why modern states emerged, how they could have been avoided and how we might live without them. This is what Kropotkin tried to do, and such questions seem particularly pressing when the sheer complexity and interconnectedness of current global challenges lead many to conclude that we need more state capacity, not less.

Even so, myth-busting is a crucial task in itself. As we seek new, sustainable ways to organise our world, we need to understand the full range of ways our ancestors thought and lived. And we must certainly question conventional versions of our history which we have accepted, unexamined, for far too long.

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[I]t’s not clear what eliminating inequality would even mean. (Which kind of inequality? Wealth? Opportunity? Exactly how equal would people have to be in order for us to be able to say we’ve “eliminated inequality”?) The term ‘inequality’ is a way of framing social problems appropriate to an age of technocratic reformers, who assume from the outset that no real vision of social transformation is even on the table.

Debating inequality allows one to tinker with numbers, argue about Gini coefficients and thresholds of dysfunction, readjust tax regimes or social welfare mechanisms, even shock the public with figures showing just how bad things have become (“Can you imagine? The richest 1 percent of the world’s population own 44 percent of the world’s wealth!”)

almost always assume that “the state” is just one thing, and that in speaking of the origins of the state one is necessarily also speaking of the origins of urbanization, written literature, law, exploitation, bureaucracy, science, and almost anything else of enduring importance that happened between the dawn of agriculture and the Renaissance, aside, perhaps, from the rise of world religions.

[O]ur own intellectual traditions oblige us to use what is, in effect, imperial language […] and the language already implies an explanation, even a justification, for much of what we are really trying to account for here. That is why, in the course of this book, we sometimes felt the need to develop our own, more neutral (dare we say scientific?) list of baseline human freedoms and forms of domination.

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