>>216456224
The post-unification period saw a severe civil war in the South (referred to as the fight against "brigandage" in official history), a brutal suppression, even a genocide, of the southern people and their resistance to the new centralized rule imposed from Turin. For every Piedmontese soldier who was killed by so-called "brigands", the Piedmontese army used to take revenge on the common population where that happened; many villages were razed to the ground and the whole population killed, leading many common peasants to join the "brigands". The civil war lasted more than 10 years and resulted in at least 250,000 deaths. The economic policies implemented by the new Italian state deliberately underdeveloped the South to favor northern industrialization. This created the macro-regional divide that persists today.
The results of all of this (and more) were huge emigration from Southern Italy, mainly to the USA and the rest of the Americas and also to Northern Italy, while emigration from the North was almost irrelevant (the opposite of the pre-invasion period).
Also the Mafia was created during the Italian unification when:
• The collapse of the Bourbon monarchy left a power vacuum in Southern Italy.
• The new Piedmontese authorities allied with local strongmen and criminal elements to maintain control and suppress resistance (who were ironically called "brigands").
• This collaboration formalized organized crime as an unofficial tool of the state to manage a hostile and exploited population. The South's economy was deliberately underdeveloped, creating systemic conditions for the Mafia to flourish and for people to turn to local strongmen for "protection" for decades to come.