The term latifondism does not merely denote the presence of large estates in a particular setting, but connotes as well the impact of the large estate upon this setting, that is, the physical and social environment. Latifondismo, therefore, contains the following attributes: the predominance of large estates which constitute the basis of an extensive agro-pastoral economy; the importance of agro-towns versus the absence of both permanent human settlement on the land and an adequate network of roads; the prevalence of insecurity in the countryside; a nomadic orientation of both shepherds and peasants; precarious links between the people and the land as expressed in absenteeism of the large estate owners, unstable employment of large segments of the peasantry, and the virtual exclusion of women from agricultural work. The peasant entrepreneur performed a crucial role in this setting, since the most decisive features of latifondismo were the modes of exploitation of both land and labor. The gabelloto was anxious to make his fortune, and to this end any means seemed permissible (Pontieri 1943: 56—57). Though his single-minded concentration on the maximization of profit brought him in conflict with the values of the peasant community (most notably his infringement of the common use rights), he was able to forestall possible levelling sanctions. As indicated above, the 18th century gabelloto controlled much of the social life of the peasant community in his role of arbitro or arbitriante (judge). In the 19th and early 20th centuries, his power domain was increasingly based on patronage, a point that will be elaborated in subsequent chapters.
To understand the pivotal role of peasant entrepreneurs in the transition from feudal to capitalist farming, we should note that they were innovators who located new resources and found adequate ways to exploit them. As we have seen, the gabelloti succeeded in controlling ever greater amounts of land, as it came up for sale in the course of the 19th century. The peasants consequently became increasingly dependent on them for access to land. In addition, the growing number of landless peasants and the general increase of the population in this period placed the gabelloti in a strong bargaining position from which to dictate the terms of employment. In several respects, these contracts were onerous and forced the peasants to accept loans advanced by their employers—the gabelloti. Through the institution of indebtedness, the Sicilian peasant of the latifondo emerged from feudal servitude only to fall into new forms of economic and political dependency. As in other parts of the world, the advent of the market and demographic growth disrupted the traditional order of lord and peasant, while at the same time, however, it provided opportunities for the rise of a new landed elite.’
The peasant of the inland area, and more particularly the sharecropper who brought his own mules and equipment to work on the estate, was permanently in debt to the gabelloto for several reasons. First, the contract left the cultivator with less than one-fourth of the crops. Second, the contract was verbal, a circumstance that left room for encroachments from the side of the gabelloto. Third, the gabelloto used two different measures: a small one when giving out seed, loans, and other soccorsi (aids) in grain; and a larger one when claiming these advances and dues from the crops at the threshing floor. Fourth, from his meager share, the sharecropper had to cede various “gifts” to the gabelloto, who distributed them among the cam pieri. These gifts were in fact tributes the peasant paid for protection. Fifth, interest rates were high; varying from 25 to well over 100 per cent. Finally, it should be clear that the risks of production were largely born by the sharecropper.
The practices of exploiting a destitute peasantry, the disdain and lack of interest of the landowning elite for productive work and long-term investment, the social prestige attached to landownership, and the honorable way of life of parasitism are each indicative of what has been called rent capitalism. As Bobek writes:
Rent capitalism arose through commercialization and the transformation, undertaken in a plain profit-seeking spirit, of the original lordly or feudal claims on income from the peasant and artisan under-strata. Its elaboration was definitively promoted by the keeping of accounts and other forms of rationalization of rent drawing.... The measures adopted [by the rent capitalist] are: appropriation of the means of production and the regular advancing of loans, i.e., the creation of indebtedness.... The opportunities to place the peasants in debt are favorable.., for two reasons: one is lack of resources of most peasants that has its roots in the rent-capitalistic system. The other is the climatically conditioned frequency of crop failure. The peasant must quite often go into debt in order that he and his family can survive. It is an absolute ideal of the rent capitalist to get as many peasants as possible into debt so permanently that with all their yearly payments they can never liquidate the initial debt, which soon becomes legendary. The practices used to get around the condemnation not only of usury but of any kind of interest, so notably present in all great religions of Oriental origin, are legion. The commonest, for example, is to estimate an advance of grain at the highest price before the harvest.... The ideal of rent capitalism is [thus] attained when the sharecropping peasant does not touch more than a meager share of the work of his hands. But it is even possible to split up farm work itself (as in plowing, harvesting, sometimes care of trees, etc.) and to pay for it with appropriate shares of the product.... Rent capitalism was true capitalism in so far as it was characterized by a striving for unlimited gain and in so far as it adopted accounting prac......... It differed from the more recent “capitalism” in that it was not linked with production, but rather was satisfied with skimming off its proceeds. In regard to production it remained fundamentally sterile. For this reason it lent to ancient urbanism as a whole a definitely parasitical character, economically (1962:234—287).
To illustrate the rent capitalistic orientation of the Sicilian latifondi, I have reconstructed a large enterprise situated in the territory of Genuardo. Consistent with the approach followed in this book, the enterprise will be explored over time, and requires a separate chapter.
The labor force required for the various agricultural and supervisory tasks was far from homogeneous. Three main categories can be distinguished here: permanent employees, sharecroppers, and casual laborers. There were 39 permanent employees, annually paid partly in money and partly in kind.
Up to the early 20th century, some of them still wore special uniforms that identified them as Baronessa personnel. The most important of them was the overseer (soprastante). In agreement with the gabelloti, the overseer established the pattern of cultivation and was charged with direct and continual management of the whole enterprise. Like overseers on other estates, this man had no formal training in agriculture whatsoever. As a rule, strong men were recruited for this post, from those who were able to “make themselves respected”—inspire fear—among the people on the estates as well as outsiders. In fact, the overseer was the man of confidence (uomo di fiducia) of the gabelloto. He dealt with the peasants set to work on the estates and took care of the general protection of the enterprise. In this crucial task he was assisted by five armed campieri on horseback who watched over the fields, crops, and animals. Like the overseer, these field guards had a reputation for toughness, which they advertised by their arrogant airs and their carrying of arms. The ways in which some of them dressed, moved around, and squinted symbolized toughness. Their reticence and the opaque ambiguity of phrases, gestures, and mimic signs they used among their peers set them apart from ordinary people. Though these strongarm men were at times strikingly polite and cordial, their general behavior and outfit expressed a capacity and willingness to coerce with physical violence. The campieri constituted a kind of private police force which, in the absence of an efficient formal control apparatus, claimed to maintain law and order in the country- side. Law and order should of course be understood here in terms of vested interests: conflicts were settled by and in favor of those who wielded appropriate influence and power. As will be shown in the second part of this book, positions of power were continually open to question: more violent or more shrewd contestants could oust the incumbents from office.
What earned these men “respect” (rispettu) was, first, their capacity to coerce with physical violence and thus invoke fear in others. Second, and closely related to these awe-inspiring qualities, they were able to provide access to resources, most notably land, for their followers.
The other permanent employees included one book-keeper, one storekeeper, two oxen drivers, and two mule drivers. In terms of payment they were on an equal footing with the campiere. Their positions on the estate did not necessarily require the qualifications for toughness. The lower ranks of the permanent employees consisted of one chief herdsman (curatolo), six herdsmen, five shepherd boys, and 15 hired hands. The shepherds, especially their foreman, shared the orientation of the campiere. They were responsible for the flocks and the production of cheese. Alone with the animals on the vast pastures, they had to take care of themselves. Hence they were armed and ready to use violence in coping with rustlers and bandits. The preparation of the fallow in spring required the employment of teams of oxen. The plowing and cross-plowing were carried out by the 15 hired hands mentioned above. Grain was sown on three types of fields: the fallow, stubble, and pasture. Its cultivation was carried out by approximately 200 sharecroppers (metatieri). They were left with either one-half or one-fourth of the crops according to whether or not they plowed the plots assigned them. The recruitment of personnel was in principle controlled by the gabelloti. They appointed the overseer and the campieri, who in turn hired most of the peasants, strongly favor- ing kinsmen and friends from Genuardo and half a dozen neighboring towns in which some of them lived. As one informant recalled: “Each town furnished a campiere, who attracted his fellow townsmen.” Expanding the supply of labor and, consequently, the range of patronage, the offer of employment was indeed a favor: the more personal the relationship between employer and job candidate, the more probable the employment and the less onerous the contract. The verbal agreements on which these contracts were based were then “respected for friendship” and involved the exchange of small services and favors.
Chapter 5
Genesis of Mafia
As indicated earlier, the elements of mafia became tangible in the early 19th century when the formative apparatus of a modem central government was superimposed upon a society still largely feudal in its main features. The predominance of large landed estates, together with the considerable amount of autonomy enjoyed by local power-holders in both rural and urban areas, expressed the extent of Sicilian feudalization. During the long centuries of foreign rule, no government ever effectively penetrated this hinterland. Spanish objectives in Sicily were minimal: the production of modest revenues and the maintenance of order. For both, the outside authorities relied on the landowning barons who dominated local government. These centrifugal forces were particularly manifest in the inland region where landlords or their agents held sway in what were appropriately called states (stati). Throughout the 18th century and up to 1812, when feudalism was abolished by law, baronial jurisdiction remained in force. Noble landlords maintained private armies of field guards to keep peasants in submission. One nobleman, for example, employed a company of twenty-four dragoons, who had their own flag and their. own military band of trumpets and drums; and frequently they could be found riding through the kingdom with as much liberty and authority as a company of royal troops.’ Neither Madrid nor Naples was much concerned with direct administration of Sicily. They abstained from interference and indulged the local aristocracy as long as their minimal demands were met. The poor development of roads, traffic, and supra-local markets preserved local isolation. Confronted with these conditions, foreign governments found the barons less costly than royal officials in local government. Spanish encapsulation was therefore largely nominal, a matter of geography: no overarching power structure assembled the various autonomous segments into a comprehensive political whole.
This situation changed after 1816 when the Bourbons were restored to Naples, capital of the new Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Their enlightened absolutism and reformism involved a long series of attempts to curb the power of the local overlords and encourage the rise of a class of small-holders from the ranks of the landless peasants. The assumption was that smallholders would provide a more stable social base than landless laborers and would be more interested in agricultural improvements than tenants or absentee landowners. By attacking the formal institutions through which the centrifugal forces in Sicilian society found expression, the Bourbon government sought to wrest control from the hands of the landowning barons and to integrate the island into the framework of a centralized State. Government and court moved from Palermo to Naples, and Sicily was divided into seven new provinces which were administered by nominated, French-trained Intendants and by non-elected town councils.
As noted before, the formal abrogation of feudalism under the British occupation of the island (1806—15) did not seriously challenge the entrenched position of the barons. This reform instead helped reinforce the traditional monopolies of the landowning aristocracy, since the fiefs were merely converted from public holdings into private properties. Though this involved the removal of baronial jurisdiction in favor of royal courts, it also meant that the peasants lost any title to land they held under feudal conditions. In the absence of substantial compensation for the lost common use rights, the peasantry emerged from social servitude only to fall into new forms of dependency as both land and labor-power were turned into commodities. The advent of the market together with a gradual increase of population tended to reduce the Sicilian peasants to an ever-growing rural proletariat.
The Bourbons recognized this effect of the abolition of feudalism and tried to counterbalance it by introducing further, more radical reforms to break up the large estates. In the early 1820s, they abolished entails and primogeniture, and another law permitted the seizure of land in settlement of debts. Special commissions worked on the restitution of arbitrarily enclosed land to poor peasants. A law of 1841 prescribed that estate owners should compensate peasant communities by returning at least one-fifth of any ex-feudal territory where common use rights had formerly been exercised. Yet the very repetition of these laws reflected the ineffectiveness of their implementation. Quite unintentionally, Bourbon legislation aided the rise of a new and powerful landed gentry rather than promoting the emergence of a class of smallholders engaged in efficient cultivation. The bourgeois landowners partly merged with and partly replaced the landowning aristocracy but retained the noble disinterest in farming and disdain for manual labor. Their chief interest was hardly agricultural improvement. The civili, as these new estate owners and gabelloti were called, made successful bids for power and prestige: apart from landed status, several of them acquired noble titles through marriage or outright purchase, and virtually all inserted themselves firmly into local government. Those who did not move to Palermo permanently became the dominant figures in the local power structure. Agrarian reform as envisaged by the central administration was anathema to them and their main ambition was to neutralize it (Mack Smith 1968a:351-69,405-14).
It is only after the establishment of a monopoly of physical force, with the centralization of power, that a general law, a common legal code for large areas, can become effective (Elias 1969, 11:82, 181). This may seem a commonplace, but like many commonplaces it is important and often forgotten. It is one thing to say that centralization evoked strong resistance by the privileged class that had always dominated Sicilian society and to emphasize that the State lacked sufficient force to cope with it, but quite another to explain the conditions that compelled the central ruler to come to terms with local vested interests. The government at Naples did much to challenge these interests and in the process whetted the appetite for land among the peasantry. Even after Unification of Italy, the State failed to monopolize the use of physical force in large areas of western Sicily and, therefore, could not hope to enforce legislation. It is only in this context that the origin and development of mafia can be understood. Mafia was born of the tensions between the central government and local landowners on the one hand, and between the latter and peasants on the other. At the same time, however, mafia helped manage these distinct but interrelated tensions and struggles since it provided a specific code through which members of the various social classes and groups arranged themselves. This chapter sketches these arrangements and rearrangements over time and, hence, the processes through which mafia came forth in early 19th century Sicily.
When a government makes the formal decision to encapsulate its hinterland, several conditions may impede this undertaking. One way to study this process is in terms of the determination and capacity of the central government to impose its laws and institutions upon those sectors of its territory it seeks to integrate, to consider the resistance that certain groups in these sectors are willing and able to offer, and to emphasize the differences in values between both sides (Bailey 1969: 144—85). We may, however, also look at the process of centralization from a different point of view, and ask what conditions make possible and account for the growth of effective central control.
In a sense, the structure of Sicilian society militated against the establishment of central institutions (see Chapter II). The poor development of roads and markets and the rent-capitalist mode of production involved specific inter-dependencies between landlords and peasants in relatively small areas. These conditions underwrote a large measure of local self-sufficiency rather than generate significant links between the various communities and baronial domains. Therefore, given the segmented character of Sicilian rural society, there was, certainly in the eyes of the people who lived there, very little to coordinate. The relative self-containment of each territory hampered rather than facilitated efforts at central control and coordination. Though the Bourbon bureaucracy was imposed from without, its impact helped initiate ramifying transformations. Cutting through the cellular structure of Sicilian society, the central administration generated an increasing social differentiation. New legislation, the indebtedness of former feudal lords, and the advent of the market permitted the fragmentation of huge patrimonies. Between 1812 and 1860 the number of land-owning families increased from 2,000 to 20,000 (though individual estates were rarely broken up). In proportion to the rise of bourgeois landowners, the number of landless peasants increased. A gradual growth of population intensified pressure on the land, and peasants began to roam over larger areas than ever before in search of employment. Brigandage became a way of life, and organized bands operated in almost every corner of the western and central parts of the island. The growing interdependence of city and countryside, of villages and towns themselves, and of estate owners and peasants generated new niches for violent entrepreneurs who could secure control over the tensions in this emerging configuration. Latifondisti and gabelloti retained their prominency and power as before save that scores of leaseholders acquired landed status. Commercialization of land and labor did not involve any significant technological improvement in agriculture; neither did it embody any new type of merchants or farmers. The various local segments remained therefore only loosely tied to one another, and this fact by itself restricted the possibilities of and the necessity for growing central coordination. Landed interests persisted as the chief centrifugal force in Sicilian society, dominating the paths linking the rural communities with the outside world.
The landlords and their retainers buttressed their control with the use of violence. They had done so before, in feudal times, but the important difference was that they now made successful incursions into the still fragile framework of the State, and thus forced formal authority to come to terms with them pragmatically. This collusion provided the large landowners with increasing leverage, especially on the local level. Time and again, the Bourbon government was forced to rely on privately recruited groups and squads to maintain order. The growth of unemployment, proletarianization, and brigandage made public order even more problematic in both urban and rural areas. In Palermo, the artisan guilds were still charged with maintaining order up to the early 1820s. Their formal suppression some years later did not, however, substantially reduce their control over special areas of the city. In the inland districts, the Companies at Arms were entrusted with the enforcement of law and order. More often than not, these bodies could only connive and mix with bandits and retainers of landlords to uphold the appearance of order:
The Companies at Arms were privately recruited groups which contracted with the government for a fee and could then be held to account for thefts: sometimes they were the feudal retainers of a landowner in whose interests they continued to work; sometimes they extorted protection money much like any other gang, and acted in collusion with criminals so as to be able to find stolen property in return for payment. At worst the police companies were brigand bands in their own right (Mack Smith 1968a:368-69).
Alongside these hybrid bodies, the government encouraged the formation of the National Guard, a volunteer class-based militia composed of well-to-do citizens, to protect property and to oppose peasant and proletarian gangs that quickly sprang up in moments of crisis.
To a large extent what was later called mafia coincided with these associations of armed strong men and their followers who exercised jurisdiction on the local level in conjunction with formal authority. It is precisely this concatenation that distinguished mafiosi from other power holders such as, for instance, the bandits and outlaws. For it is only in the context of the advent and impact of the State that we can understand and appropriately speak of mafia. Bandits are in open conflict with the law and the State. Mafiosi disregard both and act in connivance with those who represent formal law, thus validating their private control of the community’s public life (cf. Hess 1970 :91-92). A report from a Neapolitan magistrate in western Sicily demonstrates the extent these coalitions of mafiosi had developed by 1888:
... [In Sicily] there is not a single official who does not prostrate himself before the local men of influence and power, and who does not intend to profit from his office. ... This general corruption had induced the population to have recourse to remedies which are strange and dangerous beyond measure. In many towns and villages there are fraternities, sorts of sects that are called parties [partiti], without meetings and without other links than those of dependency upon a chief: a landowner or an arch-priest. Common funds serve to meet certain mutual needs as, for example, to release a civil servant or to accuse an innocent person.... The population colludes with convicts. When thefts take place, mediators emerge and offer their services to make up for the stolen goods.... Many high-placed magistrates cover up these fraternities with an impenetrable shield... [lit is impossible to induce the town-guards to scout their area.. . At the center of this state of dissolution is the capital [of Palermo] with her luxury and corruption.., a city in which live 40,000 proletarians whose subsistence depends on the pomp and caprices of the rich and powerful.2
Only three decades later these activities and relationships would be called mafia.
Moreover, the magistrate’s report indicates quite clearly how mafia issued
from the tensions between local and national interests, and developed within the
entrails of the State.