Mafia Politics. Marco Santoro

Mafia Politics - Marco Santoro


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meanings attached to the word ‘mafia’ in Sicily and in the Mezzogiorno.

      Source: Novacco 1959; Hess 1970; Lo Monaco 1990; Patella 2002; Alinei 2007.

      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).

      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.


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