About the Author

David Graeber was a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics. He is the author of The Dawn of Everything- A New History of Humanity, Debt- The First 5,000 Years and Bullshit Jobs- A Theory, and was a contributor to Harper's Magazine, the Guardian, and the Baffler. An iconic thinker and renowned activist, his early efforts helped to make Occupy Wall Street an era-defining movement. He died on 2 September 2020.

Reviews

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.
*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.
*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.
*The Guardian*

Pacey and potentially revolutionary ... This is more than an argument about the past, it is about the human condition in the present.
*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.
*BBC History*

This is not a book. This is an intellectual feast.
*Nassim Nicholas Taleb*