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History and the mafia
The main topic of Christopher Duggan's La mafia durante il fascismo is the anti-mafia campaign that the Fascist regime entrusted to the prefect Cesare Mori during the second half of the 1920s. This book was published by Rubbettino in Italian in 1986, when Duggan was not yet 30; an English version, rewritten and updated, appeared just three years later (Duggan 1986, 1989). The work was the outcome of doctoral research at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Denis Mack Smith, who provided a preface for the Italian edition. Duggan drew on a wealth of archival material, held not just in the Archivio Centrale dello Stato in Rome but also in the Archivio di Stato in Pavia, where Mori's private papers are located. He was the first to use these in a systematic way since the journalist Arrigo Petacco had published a very successful biography of the prefect some ten years earlier (1975), also the basis for a film. Duggan's book does more than reconstruct the general features of Mori's action against the mafia in Sicily: in its first section, it also sets out to provide a picture of the first phase of Fascism on the island, which at the start was certainly not one of the locations where it was most firmly established (Duggan 1986, 1-37; 1989, 95-119).
It can in fact be said, without forcing the comparison, that with La mafia durante il fascismo Duggan achieved the same sort of results, at least in terms of method, as the most innovative Italian historiography of the mafia during the same period. Within the context of a more general revival of research on Sicily and the South that was demolishing the tired old paradigms (Barone 2003), a new generation of Italian scholars had engaged in an arduous challenge: to write about the mafia without abandoning the tools of the historian. Until that point, the mafia had seldom been the subject of genuine historical research that addressed it in a sufficiently structured way and reconstructed the specific environments in which it was established. Treatment of this theme was often poorly grounded in reality and confined to the reiteration of a fund of recurring stereotypes, or left to anthropological and culturalist...