This may sound familiar. A feverish world market ratchets up demand for a resource found in a remote, undeveloped, or underdeveloped region. With barely any rule of law to protect their property rights and profits, local producers search for an alternative to lawlessness. But that alternative comes at a steep price, for the protectors end up dominating production, processing, and exporting of the resource. The resulting “extractive institution” grows fat on the profits, warping and stunting others forms of local economic development through a regime of pervasive corruption based on extortion and violence.

So it was with citrus fruits on Sicily in the nineteenth century, argue economic historians Arcangelo Dimico, Alessia Isopi, and Ola Olsson in their exploration of the origins of the Sicilian mafia.

“The combination of high profits, a weak rule of law, a low level of interpersonal trust, and a high level of local poverty made lemon producers a suitable target for predation,” they write. Neither the Bourbon regime (1816–1860), nor the newly formed government after Italian independence in 1861 had the strength or the means to effectively enforce private property rights.”

Poverty, enormous disparities in wealth, widespread brigandage, and the inability of any ordering principle to fill the role of the state after the feudal system petered out in the early 1800s set the stage for the rise of the mafia. In a way, the island was cursed by its strategic position in the Mediterranean; it was dominated successively by Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans, Spanish, and French, these colonizations doing more to hinder than foster social and economic development on the island. The secretive primal underground known as the mafia didn’t start in the poorest areas of the island; it began in areas where citrus producers made high profits from overseas exports. Those revenues were the key.

The demand for Sicilian lemons exploded after the acceptance of the fact in the late eighteenth century that citrus could prevent and cure scurvy. The Anglo-French Napoleonic Wars (1795–1814) are a case in point: the British Admiralty issued some 1.6 million gallons of lemon juice to sailors during those years. Sicily in effect became a lemon juice factory.

Citrus first came to the island with the Arabs in the tenth century. “The island’s hot coastal plains, together with the exceptionally fertile soil, continuing a limestone base with heavy coatings of lava, were well-suited for growing citrus fruits,” write Dimico, Isopi, and Olsson. Lemons, however, have little tolerance for climate extremes: they’re vulnerable to both frost and the hot scirocco that blows from the south. Production, therefore, was risky, and geographically restricted. Lemon groves were sometimes even walled to protect the trees from the wind.

And for centuries, lemons were “aristocratic symbols of wealth,” used for decoration or the extraction of essences from the peel. International demand changed all that. That demand only grew after the Napoleonic Wars: records from the port of Messina show an increase in exports of 740 barrels of lemon juice in 1837 to 20,707 in 1850. The export of lemon fragrance from the same port jumped from 57,918 pounds in 1837 to 624,977 pounds in 1850. On the island in 1853, some 7,695 hectares were in citrus production; in 1880 it was 26,840 hectares.

By the mid-1880s, 2.5 million cases of Italian citrus arrived in New York City alone every year, most of it from Palermo. It isn’t, in short, necessarily illegal products like drugs that fund the rise of organized crime. By 1900, the mafia had also commandeered the production of Sicilian sulfur (then vital for the making of soda ash, gunpowder, and even anti-fungal pesticides for the wine industry). The organization’s influence, meanwhile, spread into mainland Italy and to the United States and elsewhere, to violently corrupting results.

Editor’s note: The word “mafia” comes from mafioso, whose origins are in the Arabic marfud, which originally meant a swindler or cheat. But in Sicily, mafioso (plural: mafiosi) didn’t have a negative connotation initially; it was a laudatory term, referring to someone who stood up the brigands or private armies of the feudal barons or whoever was occupying the island at the time. They were Robin Hood-like characters, until they were just…hoods.

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