A protection industry only emerges with democratization, not feudalism.

Evidence

Franchetti’s study is crucial to chronology in two respects. First, it pinpoints the beginning of the nineteenth century as the moment of the mafia’s first appearance. Before then feudalism was still dominant: “The landlords’ bravi… did not abstain from extortion to their own advantage; nor was there any shortage of crooks who put their industry into practice on their own account; and mutual violence among the gentry took place in an absence of rules. Yet, in spite of these occasional disturbances, the use of force remained for the most part limited and subject to certain regulations” ( 1974: 89). It requires a process of democratization, as Franchetti says, for the conditions which might generate a true mafia to arise, and this process—lasting over a hundred years—did not begin until the end of the eighteenth century. Many authors have tried, with greater or lesser sophistication, to trace the origins of the mafia back to earlier periods. At best they provide us with intriguing anecdotes about the “occasional disturbances” common to feudal and premodern societies. — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 245

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that private-protection markets require democratization to emerge is a genuinely dense insight: under feudalism force is embedded in status relations, so the demand for protection-as-a-business doesn’t arise until democratization fragments that monopoly.
• XREF: Connects to Milgrom’s law merchant: both require a shift away from embedded, status-based authority before arms-length trust institutions can arise.