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.