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Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R394
Discovery Miles 3 940
You Save: R111
(22%)
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Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia (Hardcover)
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List price R505
Loot Price R394
Discovery Miles 3 940
You Save R111 (22%)
Expected to ship within 5 - 10 working days
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'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 The Enlightenment did
not begin in Europe. Its true origins lie thousands of miles away
on the island of Madagascar, in the late seventeenth century, when
it was home to several thousand pirates. This was the Golden Age of
Piracy, a period of violent buccaneering and rollicking legends -
but it was also, argues anthropologist David Graeber, a brief
window of radical democracy, as the pirate settlers attempted to
apply the egalitarian principles of their ships to a new society on
land. For Graeber, Madagascar's lost pirate utopia represents some
of the first stirrings of Enlightenment political thought. In this
jewel of a book, he offers a way to 'decolonize the Enlightenment',
demonstrating how this mixed community experimented with an
alternative vision of human freedom, far from that being formulated
in the salons and coffee houses of Europe. Its actors were Malagasy
women, merchants and traders, philosopher kings and escaped slaves,
exploring ideas that were ultimately to be put into practice by
Western revolutionary regimes a century later. Pirate Enlightenment
playfully dismantles the central myths of the Enlightenment. In
their place comes a story about the magic, sea battles, purloined
princesses, manhunts, make-believe kingdoms, fraudulent
ambassadors, spies, jewel thieves, poisoners and devil worship that
lie at the origins of modern freedom.
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