In all likelihood, by the time Italy was unified in 1860-61 the foundations of this peculiar industry were already firmly in place. Not only did the state have to fight to establish itself and its law as the legitimate authority and a credible guarantor in a region where no such authority had previously existed. It also had to compete with a rival, an entrenched, if nebulous, entity which had by then shaped the economic transactions as well as the skills, expectations, and norms of the native people. This is why arguments which blame the supposed weakness of the Italian state for the emergence of the mafia are unconvincing. The early Italian liberal state may have been confused, at odds with an eccentric reality, badly organized, and too busy elsewhere to devote much of its energy to the South (Riall 1989); but it was neither significantly weaker nor demonstrably more repressive than any other liberal state of the period. More likely the natives had developed their own special roughness.

XREF: Challenges the common narrative that the Italian state's weakness caused mafia emergence; reframes it as pre-state indigenous development. Builds on: "Protection rackets existed in Sicily by the 1600s."

Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Busi…, loc. 247