Habsburg divide-and-conquer destroyed public trust, shrinking trust to kin only

Evidence

Elsewhere (Gambetta 1987b) I have argued that the mafia can be understood as a response to the lack of trust specifically affecting southern Italy, and that endemic distrust is the crucial difference which explains why the mafia did not emerge elsewhere in the Mediterranean world. … Following Paolo Mattia Doria and other eighteenth-century Neapolitan philosophers (Pagden 1988), one can argue that as a result of a deliberate policy of divide and conquer implemented by the Spanish Hapsburgs, la fede pubblica—the public trust, the basis for a well-ordered society—was undermined. All that remained was la fede privata, that private realm populated only by kin and close friends in which people take refuge from high levels of social unpredictability, aggression, and injustice. — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 196

Categorization

• XREF: The la fede pubblica / la fede privata split is Southern Italy’s version of the two-spheres distinction; connects to why Corleone’s world of family-fealty (fede privata) is the substrate on which private protection markets grow.
• QUESTION: The claim that ‘endemic distrust is the crucial difference’ for why mafia didn’t emerge elsewhere in the Mediterranean is asserted but not yet defended here; worth chasing how Gambetta rules out, say, Spain’s own bandit traditions.