EA Malagasy legend begins like this: God and man were inseparable companions. One day God said to man, Why don’t you go away for a while and look around the earth so that we can find new topics for our conversations? – However, we do not know how this legend will continue. However, it could be that God would be amused at how interested people on earth are in Madagascan pirate tales. Because this is what the new book by David Graeber, published from the estate, tells. While another pirate book by Siegfried Kohlhammer takes an almost opposite position.
Piracy is a very old trade. Already in Cicero there is a legendary condemnation of pirates as “the common enemy of all” (communis hostis omnium). It led to the fight against and ultimately criminalization of piracy on the high seas through international law in the nineteenth century: the Paris Declaration of the Law of the Sea of 1856 prohibited privateering. The socio-romantic explanations of pirate life are just as old. Here, piratical freedom through self-organization was celebrated as a counter-model to the modern state as a western-style prison – and that is also what fascinates David Graeber.
Anarchists and Dionysics following Nietzsche
Instead of official coercion, there was supposedly solidary liberality on the ships flying the skull and crossbones flag. Instead of unfree European societies, in which princely authority standardized models of inequality more and more closely, things were drastically relaxed on deck and below: soberness made men suspicious, (supposedly) free sexuality was practiced, slavery was abolished. The popular images of this narrative are processed in the cinema.
David Graeber: “Pirates”. In search of true freedom.
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Image: Klett-Cotta Verlag
Siegfried Kohlhammer’s slim little book, clad in sober black (but of course without a skull and crossbones), is a peppery polemic. His anger at the fake piratical social romance is so passionate it’s amusing again. Kohlhammer, a freelance publicist and translator, has compiled all sorts of historical images in which the pirates come off morally too good for his taste instead of being condemned by the Maritime Court of History.
Kohlhammer finds the condemnation of piracy quite correct, but the appreciation of piracy as champions of freedom and equality seems to him completely wrong. He identifies three alleged main representatives of piratophile ideologies – “Marxists and workers’ movements, anarchists and Dionysics in the successor of Nietzsche”. While the book initially fires broadside after broadside at cardboard comrades, it gains in sophistication as it progresses. Much of the anger addresses misrepresentations of history by non-historians; another excessively politicizes pirate folklore, which doesn’t deserve so much intellectual appreciation.
What a label fraud!
More interesting is the embedding of the pirates in a pre-modern history of violence and in particular in colonialism and imperialism. Illegal piracy and legal state power were by no means always opposites. Pre-modern authorities provided captains with letters of marque. The buccaneers of the seas were partly autonomous entrepreneurs eager for profit. In part, however, they were also an instrument of state-backed, violent self-help on the high seas, analogous to the reprisals under international law, which are now frowned upon, and they supported imperial and colonial claims to power. In retelling this ambivalence, Kohlhammer relies on historical research, which he tries to put in the wrong for the sake of the argument.