Source: View of Mount Etna from Reggio Calabria - Italy - 10 Feb. 2017 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
In the Mediterranean, there is Sicily, an island born of the earth’s restless movements. Its bays ripple, and its towns slumber in peace. But then, there is Mount Etna, the highest and most active volcano in all of Europe. This mouth of fire and ash is also the reason for the island’s exceptional agriculture.
Sicily is one of Italy’s poorest regions. The GDP per capita is less than half of what it is in the rest of Italy. It is a reminder of the North-South divide in Italy, which existed long before its unification in 1871. To grasp just one root of this disparity, we can look at the land itself. Agriculture was the cause of its prosperity, but it has also bred something darker—the Mafia.
Palermo, the island’s vibrant capital, traces its origins back to 734 BC, when it was founded by seafaring Phoenicians as a bustling port city. The island’s fortunes then swelled under Greek colonies, beginning in the 8th century BC. It prospered for 500 years, and even today, the landscape is host to some of the best-preserved Doric temples in the Greek world. Its development continued under the Romans, who took control of the island in 242 BC. They turned the fertile fields into vast wheat farms, transforming the island into the ‘granary of Rome.’
Corruption and extortion were not alien to this part of Sicily’s history. Cicero, long before his rise to the consulship, laid bare the dark side of Roman rule in a series of scathing speeches against the island’s governor, Verres. During his tenure from 73 to 71 BC, Verres constructed a vast network of bribery and scandal, driven by an alleged obsession with sex and art. Particularly relevant is the illustration of extortion by a man named Apronius, an associate of the corrupt governor:
The state of Agyrium is among the first in all Sicily for honour;—a state of men wealthy before this man came as praetor, and of excellent cultivators of the soil. When this same Apronius had purchased the tenths of that district, he came to Agyrium; and when he had come thither with his regular attendants—that is to say, with threats and violence,—he began to ask an immense sum, so that when he had got his profit, he might depart. He said that he did not wish to have any trouble, nut that, when he had got his money, he would depart as soon as possible to some other city.
1. Extortion
According to Thomas Schelling, organised crime works like a monopoly. The key difference between a burglar and a 'protection' racket is that a burglar can't stop others from stealing from the same victim. Schelling suggests that asking why burglary can't become organised crime is like asking why some businesses can't easily become monopolies.
Let’s look at our Roman friend Apronius, again. His extortion is like a form of taxation. Only a certain amount can be taken. The farmer pays Apronius to be protected from him, but Apronius must also stop others from threatening the farmer. If he doesn't, the payments will not continue. Competing taxing authorities do not work.
What makes a victim more vulnerable to extortion? Schelling offers a practical criteria:
the victim should be poor at protecting themselves;
the victim cannot hide;
the victim’s activities and earnings are easily monitored;
their business cannot be carried away; and
it works best if extortion is smooth and regular.
2. Agriculture
As Putnam observed, the Sicilian kingdom was based on land. This made it especially vulnerable to organised crime. In much of the countryside, law enforcement was absent, leaving small landholders defenceless. Their wealth, tied to immovable assets like trees and harvests, was easily visible and could not be relocated. The seasonal nature of their crops also made demands for payment predictable. In contrast, Northern city-states, grounded in finance and commerce, were far less susceptible to such threats.
Without a strong local state to protect its largest industries, foreign powers moved in— first Rome, then the Muslims, the Normans, and later the Spanish. From firm military power, they could rule across the island’s small farms and peasants. While northern Italy built its republics during the Renaissance, Sicily stayed stuck in feudalism. By the late 18th century, just 90 families controlled two-thirds of Sicily's people.
Sicily had been known for its weak institutions. Putnam, an early institutional economist, observes the relationship between poor civic institutions and underdevelopment. The state has the basic duty of guaranteeing the accumulation of wealth, protecting property, and fair taxes as incentives for innovation and work. If it is unable to do that, criminal organisations fill the void (Acemoglu et al., 2017).
When the island was united with Italy, it was the collapse of an order. The Kingdom of Two Sicilies fell, and the system of feudal land relations was abolished. A new class of landowners, managers, and administrators stepped in. With force and corruption, they seized the land. Some say the Mafia began on the outskirts of Palermo, where the rich urban areas were beyond the law’s reach. Citrus growers were especially vulnerable. Lemon trees were fragile, and the first harvests took time. They needed protection and constant water. The Mafia saw their chance for extortion.
3. Underdevelopment
Even at the time of Italy's reunification in 1862, Sicily was far behind the southern regions, which lagged behind the rest of Italy. The first census in 1864 exposed just how deep the underdevelopment ran. Education levels were low, and roads and railways were scarce.
Sicily lacked cheap coal, unlike England, but that wasn’t the whole story. The powers that be were already resistant to industrial development. Much of the early industrialization in Sicily was driven by foreigners—enterprising Swiss and Englishmen like Pattison and Guppy in shipbuilding. Meanwhile, the established Sicilian elite clung to the familiar comforts of agriculture and lucrative government contracts. To truly compete would have meant risking the economic and political balance that kept them rich.
There was, of course, the corrupting effect of criminal organisations. One commentator observed in 1910:
“You can introduce new policies aiming at economically improving agriculture. But what will be the use of them, if farmers, constantly scratched by the powerful nails of the maffia, won’t be able to farm their land, as their draught animals are stolen or their harvest burned, because they refused to pay the money asked by the maffia?”
Source: Lorenzoni, Inchiesta Parlamentare sulle Condizioni dei Contadini Nelle Provincie Meridionali e nella Sicilia, Vol. VI - Sicilia, Tomo I (Roma: Tipografia Nazionale Bertero, 1910).
Extortion meant paying to be protected from other extortions. But it also meant paying to keep new innovations from taking hold. The result: Sicilian agriculture was endemically inefficient.
4. Decline
The clash between Italy's national government and the criminal elements of the south was bound to happen. In the 1920s, Mussolini’s regime, with its violent grip, faced these forces head-on. But the real shift in Sicily, the moment that weakened the grip of these criminals, came with the fall of agriculture.
The South remained relatively underdeveloped, relying on agriculture, which became less and less profitable. As a result, many no longer saw a future in Sicily. From the moment of unification, wave after wave migrated to the North, or otherwise overseas.
After the Second World War, the combination of universal suffrage and agrarian reforms hastened the decline of agriculture in Sicily. The island's surplus labour quickly shifted to more productive regions in northern Italy, with others migrating to Germany or France. The impact on Sicily’s economy was profound. Agriculture, which accounted for 56.9% of employment in 1921 and still held 51.3% in 1951, collapsed dramatically afterward. By 2001, only 8.9% of the workforce remained in agriculture (Politecnico di Torino, 2023). It has not recovered since.
Sicily's economy grew slowly, lagging behind the rest of Italy. While some new industries, such as petroleum, emerged as key exports, most of the labour force shifted toward services rather than industry. This was because services (e.g. banking, real estate, and IT) require a local presence and can adapt to the island's limited economy. Services now account for over 70% of Sicily's workforce, making them the largest sector.
Importantly, services are far less susceptible to extortion than agriculture. A fast food restaurant and its revenues are difficult to track and control. Consider a major fast-food chain. Extorting a board member in New York over a shop in Catania is a far-fetched scenario. The local staff, with no ownership stakes, are useless to the weaselly Mafioso.
Criminal organisations had to look towards the illegal economy. Gambling and prostitution continued to be steady sources of illicit income, but the real post-war shift was towards the drug trade— an industry entirely outside the bounds of the legal economy. While it was a source of wealth, such criminality distanced them from more official channels of influence. The erosion of Sicily’s agricultural sector significantly diminished the power of these criminal networks.
There were intervening events as well. The most obvious was the Maxi trials of the 1980s, where over 300 mafia members were convicted. This triggered an intense conflict between government authorities and these violent organisations. Some trial witnesses experienced the brutal murders of several family members in retaliation. With many still in jail, it remains a significant defeat of these criminal elements.
This is not to suggest that the Mafia has disappeared. In fact, an analysis of electoral results from 1994 to 2013 revealed that former Prime Minister Berlusconi’s party consistently obtained higher vote shares in municipalities with a strong Mafia presence (Buonanno et al., 2016). Between 2001 and 2014, 43 Sicilian municipalities were placed under external administration due to the Mafia’s deep involvement in local government and public procurement.
5. Conclusion
The Sicilian landscape is calm beauty, and its rise in tourism is only natural. For millennia, the island’s prosperity was tied to its fertile lands, but those same lands rooted weak local institutions. Extortion and violence formed a norm. As Sicily moved into the industrial age, it birthed the mafia, a shadow that would shape the world’s view of the ancient island. But after the Second World War, as agriculture waned, these criminal groups were driven from the legal economy, retreating into the shadows of illegal trades. The Mafia is still present, but its power isn’t what it once was.
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