Bandit. Banditry is the life and practice of bandits. The New English Dictionary on Historical Principles defined bandit in 1885 as one who is proscribed or outlawed; hence, a lawless desperate marauder, a brigand: usually applied to members of the organized gangs which infest the mountainous districts of Italy, Sicily, Spain, Greece, Iran, and Turkey. In modern usage the word may become a synonym for thief, hence the term one-armed bandit for gambling machines that can leave the gambler with no money. The term bandit originates with the early Germanic legal practice of outlawing criminals, termed *bannan. The legal term in the Holy Roman Empire was Acht or Reichsacht, translated as Imperial ban. In modern Italian the equivalent word bandito literally means banned or a banned person. About 5,000 bandits were executed by Pope Sixtus V in the five years before his death in 1590, but there were reputedly 27,000 more at liberty throughout Central Italy. Marauding was one of the most common peasant reactions to oppression and hardship. The growth of warlord armies in China was also accompanied by a dramatic increase in bandit activity in the republican period; by 1930 the total bandit population was estimated to be 20 million. Main article: Social bandit Social banditry is a term invented by the historian Eric Hobsbawm in his 1959 book Primitive Rebels, a study of popular forms of resistance that also incorporate behaviour characterized by law as illegal. He further expanded the field in the 1969 study Bandits. Social banditry is a widespread phenomenon that has occurred in many societies throughout recorded history, and forms of social banditry still exist, as evidenced by piracy and organized crime syndicates. Later social scientists have also discussed the term's applicability to more modern forms of crime, like street gangs and the economy associated with the trade in illegal drugs. In Nazi Germany, the doctrine of Bandenbekampfung meant that opponents of the regime were portrayed as bandits, dangerous criminals who did not deserve any consideration as human beings. Any opposition was suppressed with maximum force and, usually, the mass murder of civilians living in partisan-controlled areas. Banditry in Ming China was defined by the Ming government as robbery by force' punishable by death. But throughout the dynasty, people had entered into the occupation of banditry for various reasons and the occupation of banditry was fluid and temporary. Ming China was largely an agricultural society and contemporary observers remarked that famine and subsequent hardship often gave rise to banditry. In his 1991 book Disorder under Heaven: Collective Violence in the Ming Dynasty, James W. Tong uses data from provincial and prefectural gazetteers of the Ming and the Qing Dynasties to analyze patterns of violence during the Ming Dynasty. Tong analyzes that the peasants had to make a rational choice between surviving harsh conditions and surviving through illegal activities of banditry. He identifies multiple important factors in peasants' calculation of whether to become bandits or not, such as the government's ability to punish bandits. Tong concludes that his rational choice model predicts that there would be more rebellions and banditry where the likelihood of surviving hardship is minimal but the likelihood of surviving as an outlaw is maximal. As a result, Tong finds that banditry, like other types of collective violence, had a spatial and temporal pattern. Banditry was especially pervasive in the southern provinces and the second half of the dynasty. However, the Northern China and the middle Ming period had their fair share of banditry. Mounted banditry was the major and pervasive type of banditry plaguing roads around the capital Beijing and its surrounding areas, administrated and named as the Capital Region. Xiangmazei was a category of mounted bandits named after their practice of firing whistling arrows to alert their victims. Whistling arrow bandits had troubled the Capital Region throughout the first three decades of sixteenth century. They had posed such serious threat that special police attention was given to them and failure to arrest them on time incurred severer punishment. Ming historian David M. Robinson identifies some prominent causes of banditry in the Capital Region. The Region was agriculturally disadvantaged due to constant flood, and thus the peasants often lived in poverty. Furthermore, the Region's economy provided plentiful opportunities for highway robbery. In addition to the highly developed economy of Beijing, the Region also contained numerous commercial cities; these cities not only attracted merchants but also bandits.