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Everybody knows they exist: the Cosa Nostra, the Medellin Cartel, New York’s Five Families, China’s tongs. This book asks the question: how have mafias helped define the modern world? While the narrative begins deep in the past, the bulk of the story takes place after 1800. It is during the following two hundred years that the political, economic and social forces most relevant to the development of mafias took shape. The critical chapters centre upon the decades between the end of the First World War and the close of the twentieth century. In these years we see the rise of those figures most synonymous with the idea of the mafia: Capone, Escobar, Du, Lansky, Mogilevich, El Chapo and the Krays to name a few. To understand these characters, and the gangs they led, Mafia will take readers on intimate tours of the locales that birthed their notoriety: Chicago, Sinaloa, Istanbul, Shanghai or the East End. In the spirit of Simon Sebag Montefiore’s recent treatment of great families, or Sven Beckert’s history of cotton, Mafia: A Global History explains how these organizations shape, as well as reflect, the construction of modern states, economies and societies that form our increasingly integrated world.
About the author
Ryan Gingeras is a professor in the Department of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School and is an expert in modern Eastern European and Middle East history. He is the author of six books, including The Last Days of the Ottoman Empire and Sorrowful Shores: Violence, Ethnicity, and the End of the Ottoman Empire, which was shortlisted for numerous book prizes. He has published on a wide variety of topics related to history and politics in such publications as Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, Washington Post, International Journal of Middle East Studies, and more. As a faculty member of the Naval Postgraduate School, he has participated and contributed to research and executive education projects on the behalf of the US Department of State, Department of Energy, and the Department of Defense. In addition to speaking German, Spanish, and Turkish fluently, he also possesses working knowledge of Ottoman Turkish, Albanian, Macedonian, and Greek. Ryan was born in New York City but has spent much of his life in California. He currently lives with his wife and children in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
