About the Book

When societies get organised, so do their criminals. Traditionally, organised crime has been seen as an essentially modern phenomenon but as this ground-breaking collection of studies shows, from the protection racketeers of ancient Rome to the bandits who ravaged medieval and early modern Europe, the murderers-for-hire of the original Assassin cult to the pirates who sailed the Atlantic and the Caribbean, organised crime has always lurked in the shadowy underside of human society. In this book, historians, criminologists and sociologists bring new light to these shadows, for the first time exploring the role organised crime has played throughout history in a wide range of cultures and situations. Is the tale of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves an allegory of organised crime in medieval Iraq? Did organised crime flourish under the Aztecs of Central America or the Tsars of Russia? How effectively were criminals from pirates and bandits to German bank robbers able to cooperate with each other and with those who ruled over them? Did the black market help undermine Nazi control over Occupied France? In answering these and other questions, this book opens up an important and exciting new field of academic study, making a first contribution to writing the mafia history of the world.

This book was orginally published as a special issue of Global Crime.