Hello, you're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones. My guest today is Francis Gooding, a contributing editor at the LLP, who has a piece in the current issue of the paper on the possibly surprising history of pirate supplements in 18th century Madagascar.

It's a review of pirate enlightenment or the real libertalia by the late David Graber.

Hello, Francis, and thank you very much for joining me.

Hi, it's very nice to be here.

David Graber, who died in September 2020 at the age of 59,

was an anthropologist and anarchist activist,

whose books include debt the first 5,000 years,

the dawn of everything, and bullshit jobs.

He was a prominent figure in the 2011 Occupy movement,

often credited with coining the phrase,

We Are the 99%.

He finished writing Pirate Enlightenment 10 years ago, though it's published now for the first

time, and it grew out of anthropological fieldwork he undertook in Madagascar in the late 1980s.

On the face of it, pirate enlightenment seems a more narrowly focused work than debt,

the first 5,000 years, or the dawn of everything, though as we shall see, it ends up making a larger point about the way we see the world.

But first, the details and the stories.

Piracy, Francis, bullshit job, not a bullshit job.

I don't think it was a bullshit job, really.

I mean, if you look at Graber's definition of bullshit jobs in the book,

they tend to be jobs which, he says that they're jobs which could disappear

and the world would not be any worse and might even be better.

So I'm not really sure how piracy is a sort of massive organized crime endeavor fits into that. But I think probably

...