Francisco Bethencourt is a leading historian of the Portuguese-speaking world and also contributes to global history. He is the Principal Investigator of a new European Research Council Advanced Grant project on New Christian Materiality, a five-year project (2026-30) involving seven researchers. It is the first Advanced Grant hosted by the Department of History. He has been Charles Boxer Professor of History at King’s College London since 2005, having previously taught at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa and served as a Visiting Professor at Brown University and the Universidade de São Paulo.

Bethencourt authored five monographs, edited or co-edited twenty-eight books and journal issues, and published more than one hundred academic articles and chapters, contributing to the development of crucial areas of research, such as the history of racism, inequality, gendering, cosmopolitanism, utopia, minorities, merchant cultures, cultural exchange, and intellectual sociability. He curated an exhibition on Racism and Citizenship in Lisbon and is preparing two other exhibitions for 2026 and 2027.

His recent book Strangers Within. The Rise and Fall of the New Christian Trading Elite (Princeton UP, 2024), a TLS Book of the Year, offers the first comprehensive study of the crucial role played by the descendants of Jews forced to convert to Christianity in intercontinental trade, inside and outside the Iberian world. It is translated into Portuguese.

Drawing on groundbreaking research in eighteen archives and library manuscripts from six countries, Bethencourt argues that the liminal condition in which the New Christians found themselves explains their rise, economic prowess and cultural innovation, including the first coherent legal case against the discrimination of a minority singled out for systematic inquisitorial inquiry.

His acclaimed study Racisms from the Crusades to the Twentieth Century (Princeton UP) was largely based on primary sources to analyse different forms of racism in the Western world and to compare Western, Asian, and African racisms. It is translated into Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, French and Arabic. Review: “Bethencourt's long-range view - deep in time, wide in space - puts more familiar turning points in the global history of racism into novel perspective [...] more ambitiously, Bethencourt draws out racism's purpose in combating egalitarianism in Europe after 1848, in cementing racial inequality in the United States and in promoting European incursions into Asia [...] When Bethencourt reaches the past hundred years or so, the examples of the Jewish pogroms in Russia, the Armenian genocide and the Nazi racial state amply confirm his hypothesis that political projects motivate racism”, David Armitage, Times Literary Supplement, 25.7.14

Bethencourt’s first comparative monograph, O imaginário da magia, focused on magic and witchcraft in Portugal compared to southern Europe. His second monograph, The Inquisition: A Global History 1478-1834, remains the only global comparative study of this tribunal in Italy, Spain, Portugal and the Iberian empires, based on archival work. It was published by Cambridge UP in 2009, a revised edition after French, Portuguese, Spanish and Brazilian versions.

The monograph on Direitos Humanos, published in Lisbon in 2023, addresses the nonlinear development of human rights worldwide as the result of social movements.

Bethencourt is internationally recognised as a specialist in the Portuguese and European expansion across continents. He co-edited with Kirti Chaudhuri the most comprehensive history of the Portuguese expansion in five volumes, in Portuguese, and with Diogo Ramada Curto, The Portuguese Oceanic Expansion, 1400-1800 (Cambridge UP). The complex relations of power between European structures and native agency have increasingly become the focus of his work. Bethencourt is committed to writing comparative and long-term history which breaks through local, regional and national frameworks of academic research by highlighting social configurations and institutional behaviour across frontiers.

Bethencourt keeps publishing on different aspects of the history of the Portuguese-speaking world; a new project concerns the Anti-Epic Culture, a book already in production at the National Library of France in 2026 that will serve as the basis for the Leopold Delisle conferences in April.

He received a Major Leverhulme Fellowship to work on The New Christian Trading Elite, 1497-1773 (2017-2019). He is also committed to a long-term project on the history of inequality and rights worldwide. He served as director of the National Library of Portugal (1996-8) and directed the Gulbenkian Cultural Centre in Paris (1999-2004). He has been a member of advisory boards of the Warburg Institute and the Institute for Latin American Studies, as well as European research projects and PhD inter-university programmes. He served on selection committees for professors at the European University Institute, Université de Paris-Sorbonne, University of Oxford, Universidade de Coimbra and Universidade Católica Portuguesa.

Research

• New Christians and material culture
• History of Inequality and Rights in the World
• History of Racism in the World
• European Expansion (15th-19th centuries)
• Religious History and the Inquisition
• Epic and Anti-Epic Cultural Expression in the Iberian World
• Identities in the Portuguese speaking World

Teaching

Professor Bethencourt teaches Global History, particularly Power and Inequality, Visual Culture, Racism and Rights, European Expansion.

Expertise and Public Engagement

Racism, human rights, colonial past, memory.

Bethencourt has been interviewed by the BBC World Service, Die Zeit, France Inter, France Culture, Télérama, NouvelObs, Afrique Magazine, El Pais, La Vanguardia, El Mundo, El Universal (Mexico), Público, Expresso, Visão, Corriere della Sera, Estado de São Paulo, TV5 in France, TV2 in Italy, TV1 and TV2 in Portugal, and TV Globo in Brazil.

He acted as a referee for the European Research Council and has been a member of Advisory Boards of ERC projects. He has links with the Centre Roland Mousnier (Université de Paris-Sorbonne) and the Centro de Estudos Sociais (Universidade de Coimbra). He is on the advisory boards of journals in Portugal, Brazil and Spain. He curated a significant exhibition on racism and citizenship in Lisbon and contributes with opinion articles to the reference newspaper Público.

 

Selected publications

• 'Strangers Within. The Rise and Fall of the New Christian Trading Elite (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024), 602 pp.
• Direitos Humanos (Lisbon: Fundação Francisco Manuel dos Santos, 2023), 127 pp.
• Racisms: From the Crusades to the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 444 pp. Translations published in Portugal, Brazil, and Italy; under contract for French and Spanish editions
• The Inquisition. A Global History, 1478-1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 491 pp. Updated English version with a new Introduction. Previous editions in French, Portuguese (Portugal and Brazil) and Spanish.
• Editor, Gendering the Portuguese-Speaking World. From the Middle Ages to the Present (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 284 pp.

Further details

Please see Francisco's Research Profile for further details.