When I’m looking for something to read, I usually start lurking in nonfiction; and more often than not, I find myself wandering through the history section looking for my next book. I’m rarely content with fiction; I have seen enough of the world to know that it will always be more fantastical than fiction, and there’s a certain giddy thrill I get when I stumble across a book on a subject that I never knew I wanted to know about.

Case in point: David Graeber’s latest book, Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia, an historical and anthropological study of 18th-Century pirate utopias of North-West Madagascar, and their influence on the Malagasy peoples. Now that’s what I’m looking for!

Pirate Enlightenment sits comfortably between Pierre Clastres’ classic of anarchist anthropology Society Against the State, and Marcel Schwob’s majestic, eponymous portrait of medieval poet Francois Villon’s involvement with the proto-mafia Coquillards. Graeber delves deep into a past that is both murky and deliberately confusing.

Drawing on the legends of Libertalia, the pirate utopia, while not as imagined by Europeans, led directly into influencing the great thinkers of the Enlightenment. Graeber focuses on the Madagascan perspective: local traditions, customs and narratives and how the introduction of piratical mutineers, with dreams of democracy and easy living, affected the communities on the North-West coast.

In the preface, the author offers us this line: ‘Let us tell, then, a story about magic, lies, sea battles, purloined princesses, slave revolts, manhunts, make-believe kingdoms and fraudulent ambassadors, spies, jewel thieves, poisoners, devil worship, and sexual obsession that lies at the origins of modern freedom.’ It’s a promise of all of these things, and Graeber delivers in spades.