Review of "Pirate Enlightenment or the real Libertalia" by David Graeber

I begin this review with some unease...some years ago I wrote a review of one of David Graeber's other books (I think it was "The Utopia of Rules", and although it was a generally enthusiastic review (because I really do like his work) there was one slightly negative comment - and the great man took the time to write a full and damning response setting out why my slight showed how stupid I was. This made me like him slightly less, even though I still think his work is great. But he's dead now, so I should be fairly safe...though it rather begs the question as to how he can be so prolific after his demise.

I think the answer is that this is the remains of an unpublished older work, containing elements from academic papers (perhaps themselves unpublished) bolted together to make a book by a dead person. It's pretty enjoyable, but not quite right. In the preface he says it grew out of a long essay, and maybe it should have stayed one...or maybe it should have become a longer book setting out more of the context for a general reader like me. Reading "The Many Headed Hydra" I got a feeling for the role of the Atlantic in the C17th emerging economy of racial capitalism. This book focuses on the Indian Ocean and its role in a different colonial network, and I didn't know anything about that...the book seems to me to assume that I did. So a longer book would have included stuff about that, and the role of all the different actors who briefly stroll across the stage, from Armenian merchants to the French to the Dutch to translocated Caribbean pirates...

It also touches on what might be called the influence of non-Europeans on the European enlightenment, but that goes by in a flash too...on the other hand there's lots of detailed stuff about relationships between different groups in Madagascar, and I found some of that hard to follow.

Overall this was an enjoyable book with some benefits for a general reader, but I suspect it might have been better as a series of academic papers. Or a different bigger book for a general reader.