Southern Italy, from Naples south to Sicily, was the poorest part of Italy in the nineteenth century, when organised crime, in its modern sense, originated – and the easiest way to understand the rise of groups such as the Mafia and the Camorra is to think of them not as "criminal fraternities" (although they were) but as alternative providers of services that would normally be provided by the state. Such services included access to money and resources and provision of what might be considered justice of a sort, as well.

It may or may not surprise you to realise that the "services" I am describing here were certainly not available to every citizen of southern Italy – that is, the Mafia was not, despite the romantic popular depiction it sometimes receives, an engine of justice for the peasantry. Rather, these criminal groups offered their services to those who could afford them, most obviously local landowners.

I know a lot more about the history of the Mafia than about other organisations of this sort, so the remainder of this response will focus on what went on in Sicily, and understanding how and why this murderous society came into existence means understanding a little of the history of Sicily, for the Mafia could have arisen nowhere else. The island, which lies at the tip of the Italian boot, was a place unlike any other. It had been a vitally important crossroads for thousands of years, standing astride trade routes that ran north and south and east and west across the Mediterranean, and its strategic importance meant that it had been fought over ever since Roman times. Greeks, Arabs, Normans, Holy Roman Emperors, the French and the Aragonese had ruled over Sicily, and all of them had ruthlessly exploited it. Most recently, in the middle of the eighteenth century, the island had become subject to the Bourbon kings of Naples – a junior branch of the royal family of Spain which ruled over a fragile patrimony known as the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The Bourbon state consisted of the southern half of mainland Italy and the island itself, but there never any doubt as to which of its pair of provinces was most important. Its kings lived and reigned in Naples, the largest city in all Italy, and visited the island portion of their kingdom as infrequently as once a decade.  Even in the Two Sicilies, in short, Sicily itself was seen as a distant, troublesome and barbarous place — of value for its revenues, but too rugged and too rural to befit a king.

For the people of the island, this indifference was to be expected. Centuries of occupation and harsh taxation, of being ruled from afar by men who had no roots on the island and no reason to care for it, bred in the local people a hatred of authority and a deep-rooted unwillingness to settle disputes through the same courts that protected foreign interests and enforced alien laws. Rebellion was commonplace in Sicilian history, and resistance – however mulish and unheroic – was seen as praiseworthy; private vengeance and vendetta were preferable to abiding by the rule of law. Even in the nineteenth century, outlaws were popular heroes there; banditry was more deeply-rooted in Sicily than it was anywhere else in Europe, and it endured there longer, too. Little changed even after 1860, when Giuseppe Garibaldi landed on the island on his way to uniting all of Italy. Garibaldi himself was all but worshipped on the island, because he freed it from its Bourbon overlords. But the Italy that he created, with its capital in Rome, treated Sicily much as the state that it replaced had done, extracting what it could in taxes, and giving little or nothing in return. Peace was kept by a garrison of northerners and by police, recruited on the mainland, whose most important duty was not solving crimes but keeping order.  The carabinieri did this by setting up and running a huge network of spies and informants to keep an eye on potential malcontents and revolutionaries.

It would be misleading, nonetheless, to think of the Sicily of 1860 as a province united in more than its suspicion of outsiders. There were considerable differences between the eastern districts, where the earth was rich and the local barons still lived on their estates, investing in roads, bridges and irrigation schemes, and the western portions of the island, where it was far more difficult to wrest a living from the land. Western Sicily was a place of mountains, dust, poor soil and poorer agricultural towns. A thin strip along the coast was civilised and wealthy; it consisted of the capital, Palermo — an elegant port with little fishing and less industry, many of whose people earned a living as functionaries of the state — and the Conca d’Oro, the Golden Shell, where the island’s most important exports, oranges and lemons, were grown in innumerable small citrus groves. The aristocrats of the western hinterlands were mostly absentees, who preferred to live comfortably in Palermo and lease out their estates to grasping tenant farmers known as gabelloti. It was in the interest of the barons of Palermo to keep the city’s working classes pacified with cheap bread and endless festivals, but the peasants of the distant interior were accorded less respectful treatment. In the eyes of many of the barons, they existed merely to grow food and pay taxes, at rates that, by 1860, required them to hand over half their crops and half their earnings to their landlords and the government.

These demands left peasants practically destitute — a state of affairs rendered more unbearable by the fact that most barons, and even the gabelloti who ran their estates, paid practically nothing. One army officer, sent over from the mainland to help keep order, remembered that

it hurts to see some of the scenes you come across when you live here like I do. One hot day in July… I was on a long march with my men. We stopped for a rest by a farmyard where they were dividing the grain harvest. I went in to ask for some water. The measuring had just finished, and the peasant had been left with no more than a small mound. Everything else had gone to his boss. The peasant stood with his hands and chin planted on the long handle of a shovel. At first, as if stunned, he stared at his share. Then he looked at his wife and four or five small children, thinking that after a year of sweat and hardship all he had left to feed his family with was that heap of grain. He seemed like a man set in stone. Except that a tear was gliding silently down from each eye.

All this was difficult enough when times were good. But times were rarely good for long in Sicily, and the lot of the peasantry worsened considerably in the course of the nineteenth century. The abolition of feudalism, which occurred only in 1812, upset the economy of the interior; it resulted in the dissolution of many large estates, with a consequent diminution in efficiency, and ushered in the rawest sort of capitalism. The gabelloti — who paid fixed rents to the barons for the right to farm their lands — had every motivation to extract the maximum revenues from their properties, and wages, where they were paid at all, were driven down by an abundance of labour, a population explosion in the early nineteenth century taking the number of Sicilians to as many as two million. That total far outstripped the numbers that the island could support, and the misery endured by Sicily’s peasants was increased by a long succession of natural disasters — floods, drought and landslides among them — that culminated in the terrible earthquake that destroyed the city of Messina in 1908 and killed as many as 80,000 people. So great was the poverty in the western districts of the island, and so terrible the destitution, that as many as a third of the population of the island emigrated between 1870 and 1910, at first mostly to the cities of northern Italy, but increasingly to the United States. One side effect of this unparalleled movement of men, women and children was that, after about 1890, practically every family in Sicily had friends or relatives in the great American seaports, particularly New York and New Orleans.