Ahoy Mateys

I suppose you have to hope that this isn’t a front for a Royal Navy base…or perhaps worse, some sort of ghastly egalitarian commune where you spend your days sowing sails and scratching at barnacles. 

The anarchist thinker David Graeber did indeed uncover some interesting goings on at a late seventeenth century pirate democracy called Libertalia on Madagascar.

In his last book before an untimely death — Pirate Utopia — Graeber describes how a kind of proto-Sugar Daddy culture on the island set off a significant socioeconomic feedback loop, which ought to be an eye opener for all those tropical, anti-colonial soapbox orators.

These boatloads of wealthy and exotic strangers unmistakably represented a significant catch for Malagasy women, presenting them with a striking opportunity for the kind of sexual and socioeconomic freedom that had previously eluded them.

The pirates came and settled with their portable wealth and their unusual political values, but had very limited local social capital and grasp of the language, which led them to cede a lot of control and autonomy to their native wives, often trusting them to manage all of their pieces of eight.

The rather surprising end result of this arrangement was the development of an independent female merchant class whose children would be established as a new and powerful aristocracy on Madagascar — not perhaps what one might have anticipated from a project whose origins lay in the decentralised ways of salty sea dogs (which derived in part from the fact that before embarking on this somewhat syndicalist seafaring lifestyle, these plunderers had mostly all grown up under a multiplicity of different forms of government, some even former slaves).

Libertalia went from Popular/Leveler Democracy to Complacent Aristocracy via Merchant Capitalism, which is not quite how Marx plotted out the Dead Man’s Tale of human history.