Pirates of the latter day: or, lights for a dark age

To coincide with the US publication today of my new book Finding Lights in a Dark Age, I think it’s time to start writing some blog posts about it. I have a bit of unfinished business in relation to other projected posts, but hopefully I can sweep them up somewhere along the way. It’s going to be a slow tick over, though, because I don’t currently have much capacity to turn out blog posts at speed.

I’ll begin by linking something I mention at the very start of the book with something I mention at the very end.

At the start, I describe a process of climate change in early medieval times caused by volcanic activity which ultimately helped prompt the emergence of the Vikings as an expansionary and predatory force across an impressive stretch of the globe. I liken Viking society, both for good and (mostly) bad, to a gangster or pirate culture, with a code of honour that applies to its protagonists but not to its victims. This pirate culture, I argue, is a foundation of modern political culture more generally, even if its violence has often been more sublimated in recent times. People tend to forget this, assuming that violence outside an explicit social contract is just the inherent way of things. It is, for sure, one way that people have commonly done politics, and not only in medieval and modern Europe. But it’s not the only way, and this is worth remembering in our present troubled times. We’ve touched on this issue in recent discussions on this blog.

At the end of the book, I give an acknowledgement to Marshall Sahlins and David Graeber, anthropologists of the Chicago ‘anarchist school’, who were more influential upon me in the writing of it than I’d anticipated. But when I wrote Finding Lights… I hadn’t yet read Graeber’s book Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia – perhaps slightly unfortunately in view of my opening piratical theme.

Pirate Enlightenment was, according to Graeber, originally written as a chapter for a book he co-wrote with Sahlins called On Kings, which I did read before writing Finding Lights… I drew on its analysis of stranger kings to try to make some sense of our baffling contemporary politics – again, something touched on in recent blog posts and discussions.

I won’t try to summarise Pirate Enlightenment here, but the mise-en-scène ...