The Sicilian Mafia - Life Inside Cosa Nostra - World Documentaries

The Sicilian Mafia, likewise known as Cosa Nostra ("Our Thing"), is a criminal distribute in Sicily, Italy. It is a loose organization of criminal groups that share a typical organizational structure and code of conduct, and whose core activities are security racketeering and the arbitration of disputes in the black market. Each group, known as a "family", "clan", or "cosca", declares sovereignty over an area, normally a town or town or an area (borgata) of a larger city, where it runs its rackets. Its members call themselves "males of honour", although everyone often refers to them as "mafiosi".
The American Mafia occurred from offshoots of the Mafia that emerged in the United States during the late 19th century, following waves of emigration from Italy. There were comparable spin-offs in Canada among Italian Canadians. The same has been claimed of ordered criminal activity among Italians in Australia.
Modern scholars believe that the Mafia's seeds were planted in the upheaval of Sicily's shift out of feudalism beginning in 1812 and its later annexation by landmass Italy in 1860. Under feudalism, the nobility had a lot of the land and enforced law and order via their private militaries. After 1812, the feudal barons steadily marketed off or rented their lands to civilians. Primogeniture was abolished, land could possibly no longer be confiscated to resolve debts, and one fifth of the land was to come to be private building of the peasants. After Italy annexed Sicily in 1860, it rearranged a big share of public and church land to civilians. The outcome was a massive boom in landowners: from 2,000 in 1812 to 20,000 by 1861. With this boost in property owners and commerce came even more conflicts that needed settling, contracts that required applying, purchases that required oversight, and properties that required securing. The nobles were launching their private militaries to allow the state take over the work of enforcing the legislation, however the whole new authorities were not up to the activity, largely because of their inexperience with industrialism.