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How Enlightened Were the Pirates of Madagascar?

• squircle 2y ago
  > Ratsimilaho’s rule, Graeber says, was a “masculine riposte to the self-assertion of women who allied themselves with pirates.” He argues that ambitious local women, including many successful merchants, had been able to get pirates to concede power, because, although the men brought treasures with them, when they arrived they had no social or cultural capital. When women were excluded from kabary — village assemblies where community members sat around gravely smoking tobacco and drinking honey wine — it constituted a provocation in a world where “local women clearly had the upper hand.”