The Lemon Gang: Citrus and the Rise of the Mafia

The icon indicates free access to the linked research on JSTOR.

This may sound familiar. A frenetic global market increases demand for a resource located in a remote, undeveloped or underdeveloped region. With little to no rule of law to protect their property rights and profits, local producers are looking for an alternative to lawlessness. But that alternative comes at a high price, as the protectors ultimately dominate the production, processing and export of the resource. The resulting ‘extractive institution’ grows fat with profits, distorting and stunting other forms of local economic development through a regime of widespread corruption based on extortion and violence.

This was also the case with citrus fruits in Sicily in the nineteenth century, argue the economic historians Arcangelo Dimico, Alessia Isopi and Ola Olsson in their research into the origins of the Sicilian mafia.

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

Poverty, enormous wealth disparities, widespread looting, and the inability of any organizing principle to fulfill the role of the state after the feudal system was extinguished in the early 19th century set the stage for the rise of the mafia. In a sense, the island was cursed by its strategic location in the Mediterranean; it was successively dominated by Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans, Spanish and French, with these colonizations hindering rather than promoting social and economic development on the island. The secretive, primordial underground known as the mafia did not begin in the poorest parts of the island; it started in areas where citrus producers made high profits from overseas exports. That revenue was key.

Demand for Sicilian lemons exploded after it was accepted in the late eighteenth century that citrus could prevent and cure scurvy. The Anglo-French Napoleonic Wars (1795–1814) are an example of this: the British Admiralty issued around 1.6 million liters of lemon juice to sailors in those years. Sicily essentially became a lemon juice factory.

Citrus first came to the island with the Arabs in the tenth century. “The hot coastal plains of the island, together with the exceptionally fertile soil, which perpetuated a limestone base with heavy layers of lava, were well suited to the cultivation of citrus fruits,” write Dimico, Isopi and Olsson. However, lemons have little tolerance for climate extremes: they are vulnerable to both frost and heat scirocco that blows from the south. Production was therefore risky and geographically limited. 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 for extracting essences from the peel. International demand has changed all that. That demand only grew after the Napoleonic Wars: records from the port of Messina show that exports of 740 barrels of lemon juice in 1837 increased to 20,707 in 1850. Exports of lemon fragrance from the same port rose from 57,918 pounds in 1837 to 624,977 pounds. pound in 1850. The island had approximately 7,695 hectares of citrus production in 1853; in 1880 it was 26,840 hectares.

In the mid-1880s, 2.5 million cases of Italian citrus arrived in New York City alone, most of it from Palermo. In short, it is not necessarily illegal products such as drugs that finance the rise of organized crime. By 1900 the Mafia also controlled the production of Sicilian sulfur (then vital for the production of soda ash, gunpowder and even antifungal pesticides for the wine industry). The organization’s influence, meanwhile, spread to mainland Italy, the United States, and elsewhere, producing violently corrupt results.

Editor’s note: The word “mafia” comes from mafiosowhose origins lie in Arabic marfuwhich originally meant a swindler or deceiver. But in Sicily mafioso (plural: mafiosi) initially had no negative connotation; it was a term of praise, referring to someone who resisted the bandits or private armies of the feudal barons or whoever occupied the island at the time. They were Robin Hood-esque characters, until they were just… hoods.

Support JSTOR daily! Join our membership program on Patreon today.