Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia

Chatty, punky, anti-everything catnip... it is good fun. It's about pirates, after all. * Sunday Times * Engaging ... the chief pleasure of Graeber's writing is not that one always agrees with his arguments about the past. It is rather that, through a series of provocative thought experiments, he repeatedly forces us to reconsider our own ways of living in the present. Whatever happened in 18th-century Madagascar, Pirate Enlightenment implies, we could surely all do with a bit more free-thinking and egalitarianism in our own social, sexual and political arrangements. -- Fara Dabhoiwala * The Guardian * Open and imaginative... Graeber is writing in a hybrid genre of poetic history, in this sense, but he is also reminding us why such hybridisation is good for us. * New Statesman * A characteristically radical re-reading of history that places the social and political experiments of pirates at the heart of the European Enlightenment. A brilliant companion volume to the best-selling Dawn of Everything. -- Amitav Ghosh Feisty, heroic ... a highly original thinker and a wonderful writer. -- Peter Frankopan * New York Times * A genius... blazingly original, stunningly wide-ranging, impossibly well read. * The Atlantic * A thinker who revolutionises the way we see the world and helps us reimagine the things we once took for granted. * New Statesman * PRAISE FOR THE DAWN OF EVERYTHING: Iconoclastic and irreverent ... an exhilarating read. -- David Priestland * The Guardian * Pacey and potentially revolutionary ... This is more than an argument about the past, it is about the human condition in the present. -- Bryan Appleyard * Sunday Times * Blazing with iconoclastic rebuttals to conventional wisdom. Full of fresh thinking, it's a pleasure to read and offers a bracing challenge on every page. -- Simon Sebag Montefiore * BBC History * This is not a book. This is an intellectual feast. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb