A bandit becomes a monarch, a gang becomes a government and organised crime at the heart of every modern state. Homo Criminalis shows the emergence of modern society through the evolution of the underworld and its crimes. From Chinese banditry and eighteenth-century English tea smuggling to today’s cocaine submarines and the high-tech crimes of tomorrow, showing how the world’s dark underbelly shapes us, no matter how we try to outpace it.

Mark Galeotti, a prolific author specialising in Russia and organised crime, shows “our dynamic interconnected globalised networked cross-cultural world is so permeated by organised crime. It is very hard to see where upperworld ends and underworld begins”.

An Albanian drug baron lives in Dubai, and his men in Ecuador buy cocaine that they ship to Europe packed in with the bananas we eat. On its arrival, more young Albanian men oversee distribution and then, flush with cash, invest in property back home. Galeotti reveals about organised crime when he turns his sights to forgery, he quotes John Calvin, the Protestant theologian, as writing in 1543 that, if all the pieces of true cross that were being venerated as genuine relics were gathered together, they would form a whole ships cargo”.

You replace a broken fridge, but you don’t know and may not care if somewhere down the line it was not disposed of properly but tipped into the sea, “Crime pays and pollutes”.

According to Galeotti cybercrime could cost the world $10.5 trillion a year. There are 36 million drug addicts in the world, and between 1800 and 1875, 1.35 million slaves were imported from the Caucasus and Crimea to the Ottoman Empire, and more from Africa. What is legitimate today may once have been criminal and vice versa. The origins of Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation lay in the opium trade. The opium wars were fought by Britain and France to keep China’s ports open for Indian opium. Galeotti writes English privateers were given official sanction to ravage England’s enemies. Russian intelligence recruits killers and criminals today. 

Galeotti writes “ We have to recognise that our banks are full of dirty money, our foreign policy depends on deals with kleptocrats, our supply chains are packed with counterfeit, our cities are built on foundations of stolen sand  and speculative fraud and our consumer goods and raw materials alike are produced by trafficked labour. We are unfortunately, all more complicit than we like to think”.

Homo Criminalis: How Crime Organises the World by Mark Galeotti, Ebury Press £22, 320 pages