It’s really hard to know how to rate this book! It is meandering to the point of tangential—Graeber confesses that it evolved out of an essay that didn’t stop growing, and I wonder if it would have been better if forced to be more concise. It also has some of the same issues that I saw in The Dawn of Everything (indeed, this could have been a section of that book), in that it’s working with data and history that are impossible to nail down for sure. While Graeber fully and repeatedly acknowledges that, it’s still hard to see this as more than a predetermined thesis supported by particular interpretations of scanty evidence.

And yet, like The Dawn of Everything, that thesis is bold and exciting enough to be worth considering. Graeber is clearly interested in the real possibility of egalitarian societies, and he’s equally committed to the idea that they can (and have) come from the Global South, not just enlightened Europeans. I also love Graeber’s clear love for Madagascar; I knew a Malagasy family in France that (at the risk of confessing to tokenism) made me curious about this country in a way I never acted on until now.

So, yeah, the book isn’t without faults, but I love it for what it’s trying to do, and I really enjoyed what it taught me about a culture and history I had known little about before reading this. Definitely worth the $8 I spent on a damaged copy at an indie bookstore.

• Pirate Enlightenment
• David Graeber
• independent bookstores
• The Dawn of Everything
• Madagascar
• Malagasy
• pirates
• anarchism
• Enlightenment
• Global South
• egalitarianism
• democracy