Banditry

Banditry is the act of marauding or robbing, typically carried out by loosely organized armed groups known as bandits engaged chiefly in robbery, brigandage and thievery rather than in a single opportunistic theft. The English word entered use around 1776 from Italian, tracing back to earlier Germanic legal practice of formally outlawing criminals, and by the nineteenth century it was applied especially to organized gangs operating in mountainous regions such as Sicily, Sardinia, Spain, Greece, Iran and Turkey. Banditry has been extensively studied as a historical and sociological phenomenon, including in the work of historian Eric Hobsbawm, with named figures such as Carmine Crocco and Salvatore Giuliano in Italy and Zhang Mao in China, and documented periods of particular intensity including the Ming dynasty in China and the era of Italian unification.