History Seminar: Rosella Merlino

Histories of Italian American organised crime have tended to locate its emergence in the period of mass migration around the turn of the twentieth century, with particular attention to western Sicily and the rise of recognisable mafia families and their male-dominated leadership. But what happens if we look east, and earlier?

Drawing on contemporary press, census records and the daily reports of the US Treasury Secret Service Division, this presentation examines counterfeiting networks operating in New York in the 1870s and 1880s, several of whose leading male and female figures came from Messina, in north-eastern Sicily.

Following their activities across the Atlantic, it considers these networks within the wider political, economic and social transformations of the Italian post-Unification decades, and the opportunities afforded by transnational mobility.

It also examines their representation in local and national newspapers amid growing anti-Italian sentiment, and in relation to circulating discourse on the mafia and the Italian ‘South’.