Source: Novacco 1959; Hess 1970; Lo Monaco 1990; Patella 2002; Alinei 2007.
The Setting (The Case Study)
The Sicilian mafia is the main empirical focus of this book, on the assumption that, while not exhausting the phenomenon, this regional and historical case has a sort of ontological primacy – at the very least for giving the name to the category. However, in developing and testing its arguments, the book makes comparative references to other mafias as well, especially the American Cosa Nostra (strongly linked to the Sicilian mafia), the Neapolitan camorra, the Calabria-based ’ndrangheta, the Russian mafiya, the Japanese yakuza and the Chinese triads. An unusual comparative attention is also devoted to a still relatively understudied instance of mafia, the Indian mafia (Ghosh 1991; Michelutti et al. 2018). It is one of the strategic moves of the book to compare cases of mafia life in geographically and culturally distant locations that may have some commonalities in their political histories. What makes India an interesting comparative case for a study of mafia focused on the Sicilian case is its colonial past under the British.
Suffice it to say that, over ten centuries, Sicily was conquered and ruled by such different peoples as Muslim Saracens, Normans, the French, Aragones, the Spanish and, finally, (northern) Italians. After unification, Sicily accounted for a large portion of the Italian emigration towards the United States, Latin America and Africa. Emigration means not only exit and loss, but also gaining new ideas and institutions through transnational circuits, mimicry and imitation. The American experience is an integral part of the Sicilian mafia’s current repertoire – a pattern that works also for other Italian mafias. But the same could be said for other experiences of contact and interchange as well. Muslim domination lasted two centuries, leaving a deep cultural heritage that is still visible in folklore, language, art and gastronomy (Britt 2007; Dalli 2008). In the twelfth century, Sicily was the site of one of the very first experiments in state-building in the world (under the Normans, who introduced feudalism to the island), before becoming a sought-after colony of grand foreign powers like the rising French monarchy, the Habsburg Empire and then the Bourbons, who dominated in Spain and Italy from the sixteenth century well into the nineteenth. Sicily’s status changed many times; sometimes it was a totally dependent colony (not only under foreign powers in Paris or Madrid, but also under Italian continental cities like Naples), at other times it was a semi-autonomous regional state. When the mafia was first ‘discovered’ – something which occurred in the 1830s – Sicily was still a dominated country in the Mediterranean Sea, at the extreme southern periphery of Europe, very close to Africa, and longing for its independence, or at least some degree of political autonomy (Abulafia 1977, 1987; Bresc and Bresc-Bautier 1993; Takayama 2019).
While never formally a colony, for centuries Sicily had been under the dominion of some other, often foreign, political centre. The famous Sicilian Vespers (1282) epitomises the strong tensions this situation of subjection could generate. After Spanish domination, which lasted for more than two centuries (see Benigno 2007), a British protectorate was established in 1806 continuing until 1816 – a short period, but also a very productive one (Simon 2021). In those few years, in fact, a series of reforms changed the political and institutional structure of the island – including the definitive demise of feudalism and experimentation with a liberal constitution and parliamentary monarchy (Mack Smith 1968). The first half of the nineteenth century was a period of intense mobilization, and insurgences occurred in 1820, 1838, 1848 and 1866 (Nicotri 1934). Even after Italian unification (1861), Sicily was periodically the site and target of political projects of separation from the Italian national state, seen by many Sicilians as a colonial power. In 1943, the Sicilian separatist movement gained new force and, with the aid, it seems, of organized banditry (for the occasion promoted to the status of a newly formed Sicilian army) and the mafia, produced the most impressive moment of crisis in national identity since unification (Marino 1979). The granting of regional autonomy to Sicily after the Second World War was mainly an institutional response from the national centre to this deep and dangerous local quest for independence. In brief, we could say that the Sicilian mafia evolved in a context of semi-colonial dependence periodically marked by violent popular insurgencies against foreign dominators. The aforementioned alliance of mafia with political separatism was hardly occasional. We can say that no event of political mobilization in the modern history of Sicily, at least since the 1830s, has taken place without the active presence of the mafia and mafiosi. This presence is just the tip of the iceberg of the political role played by the mafia in Sicily, and, from this basis, in other parts of the globe.
The decades that predated the discovery of the (Sicilian) mafia were the same in which a relatively new institutional form, the sovereign territorial state, was expanding its hegemony from specific regions of central Europe, such as England and France (and to a lesser degree Prussia), where it was first elaborated, to the rest of Europe, including Sicily. Historically, both France and England had important vested interests in the Mediterranean island: France in the thirteenth century (the period of the Vespers), England (the other island where the Normans dominated and had started the institutional experiments which strongly contributed to the early emergence of the state: see Strayer 1970) until the early nineteenth century, during and after the Napoleonic wars, when Sicily was under the protection of the United Kingdom.
The multilayered political and social history of Sicily, from the Middle Ages to national unification under the Kingdom of Italy (1861) and beyond, accounts for the institutional synthesis that the name ‘mafia’ has the power to evoke. It is a claim of this book that understanding the Sicilian mafia means accounting for its social and institutional genesis in this complex and long-lasting web of influences and interests impinging upon Sicily since the Middle Ages (see Greif 2006 for a discussion about the lasting influence of medieval institutions). The rise of the mafia is just another aspect of the history of the conflict between the state and other political forms – such as city-states, empires, city-empires, as well as more primordial but effective organizations such as clans, families, warrior-leagues and so on – and it is within this history that it has to be embedded. Some elements suggest that the mafia’s institutional history may also be embedded in the history of political ideas, including utopian (e.g., socialist and, especially, anarchist) ones. In this respect, even though they are probably exceptional, the stories of Vito Cascio Ferro and Bernardino Verro – respectively, an influential godfather who was a leading local socialist and anarchist in his youth, and a renowned Sicilian trade unionist who was a mafioso in his youth – are enlightening. As a minor point of the book, I emphasize the anarchist moment as the plea for an understanding of the mafia’s structure and functions independently from any concession to the state as a political ideal and an institutional model; as I will never be tired of repeating, I want to analyse and assess ‘the mafia’ from a radically nonstate-centric and, possibly, non-Westernized point of view. This emphasis on anarchism is not only a theoretical move but a return to what I see as one major historical spur to the development of mafias all over the world, including Italy. Contrary to an entrenched belief – including Francis Marion Crawford’s claim, which I will cite in the next section – anarchism and the mafia, at least in Sicily and the US, ran parallel for a while. The book also capitalizes on this historical connection to derive a few theoretical implications.
However, the Mediterranean region is a cultural formation on its own (Cassano 2001; Piterberg et al. 2010), and in this historical and geographical juncture we have to locate the historical experience that gave ‘mafia’ its name, i.e. the Sicilian mafia. This was actually the great insight of Fernand Braudel’s 1949 study, The Mediterranean World: the idea that it was possible to have a society maintaining itself through the active exchange of goods, people and ideas without a unified ‘administrated territory’ as we know it in our statist times. This book further develops the idea that Sicily – i.e. the place where something like ‘a mafia’ was first identified in the 1860s and from which every analysis of the mafia as a social type should start – is located in this Mediterranean world between Europe (i.e. a dominant region of the global North) and Africa, or better, the African shores of the Mediterranean Sea (i.e. an important piece of the global South). It occupies an interstitial