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Triads: A History of the Brotherhoods
A History of the Brotherhoods is a narrative history of one of the world’s most enduring—and most misunderstood—organizations.
Long before the word “Triad” became synonymous with organized crime, these brotherhoods emerged as survival networks in a world defined by weak states, violent transitions, and mass displacement. Rooted in oath, ritual, and myth, they offered protection, belonging, and order where official authority was distant, corrupt, or hostile. What began as resistance and mutual aid did not disappear when empires fell. Instead, it adapted.
Tracing the evolution of the Triads from secret societies in southern China to global networks embedded in ports, cities, and diasporas, this book examines how belief systems, symbolic codes, and disciplined loyalty became durable organizational infrastructure. It shows how rituals outlived their original political purpose, how rebellion gave way to commerce, and how brotherhoods learned to operate across borders, markets, and generations without ever fully abandoning their self-image as moral actors.
Rather than treating the Triads as aberrations or caricatures, this history takes their internal logic seriously. It explores how secrecy functioned as technology, how violence was rationalized as governance, and how culture—from kung fu mythology to Hong Kong cinema—fed back into organizational identity. The result is not a catalogue of crimes, but an institutional a study of how informal power survives modernization, globalization, and reform.
Written with narrative restraint and analytical clarity, A History of the Brotherhoods reframes organized crime as a problem of continuity rather than pathology—asking not only how these organizations operate, but why they have proven so difficult to dismantle, and what their persistence reveals about the worlds that produced them.
Long before the word “Triad” became synonymous with organized crime, these brotherhoods emerged as survival networks in a world defined by weak states, violent transitions, and mass displacement. Rooted in oath, ritual, and myth, they offered protection, belonging, and order where official authority was distant, corrupt, or hostile. What began as resistance and mutual aid did not disappear when empires fell. Instead, it adapted.
Tracing the evolution of the Triads from secret societies in southern China to global networks embedded in ports, cities, and diasporas, this book examines how belief systems, symbolic codes, and disciplined loyalty became durable organizational infrastructure. It shows how rituals outlived their original political purpose, how rebellion gave way to commerce, and how brotherhoods learned to operate across borders, markets, and generations without ever fully abandoning their self-image as moral actors.
Rather than treating the Triads as aberrations or caricatures, this history takes their internal logic seriously. It explores how secrecy functioned as technology, how violence was rationalized as governance, and how culture—from kung fu mythology to Hong Kong cinema—fed back into organizational identity. The result is not a catalogue of crimes, but an institutional a study of how informal power survives modernization, globalization, and reform.
Written with narrative restraint and analytical clarity, A History of the Brotherhoods reframes organized crime as a problem of continuity rather than pathology—asking not only how these organizations operate, but why they have proven so difficult to dismantle, and what their persistence reveals about the worlds that produced them.
124 pages, Kindle Edition
Published December 22, 2025
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