Francisco Bethencourt is a leading historian of the Portuguese-speaking world; he also contributes to world and global history. His recent book Strangers Within. The Rise and Fall of the New Christian Trading Elite offers the first comprehensive study of the crucial role played by the descendants of converted Jews in intercontinental trade, inside and outside the Iberian world.

Drawing on groundbreaking research in eighteen archives and library manuscripts in six different 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 case against the discrimination of a minority singled out for systematic inquisitorial inquiry.

In his previous book, Racisms from the Crusades to the Twentieth Century, largely based on primary sources, he studies different types of racism in the Western world and compares the phenomena to Asia and Africa. His first comparative work focused on magic in Portugal and southern Europe, before studying the Inquisition in Italy, Spain, Portugal and the Iberian empires. A major theme in his research has been how individuals interact and shape patterns of behaviour. This led Bethencourt to experiment with sociometrics when reconstituting networks of sorcerers in two Portuguese towns, or apply methods from the sociology of organisations to understand the ubiquity of inquisitorial bureaucracy and its rootedness in the social fabric.

The issue of power in social exchanges has been at the core of his research on religion, first in relation to the competition between magicians and priests, then in relation to the role of the Inquisition within the Catholic Church and its impact on society. He enlarged his scope even further when working on the Portuguese and European expansion across continents. He co-edited with Kirti Chaudhuri the most comprehensive history of the Portuguese expansion in five volumes. The complex relations of power between European structures and native agency increasingly became the focus of his work. Comparative and long term history breaks through local, regional and national frameworks of academic research, highlighting social configurations and institutional behaviour across frontiers. Bethencourt keeps publishing on different aspects of the history of the Portuguese-speaking world, particularly on racism, utopia, cosmopolitanism, and inequality.

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 social inequality in the world. In 1993, the PhD on the Inquisition received the Salvador Madariaga prize and, in 2003, Bethencourt was honoured for his achievements as historian with the Order of Henry the Navigator. 

Research

• History of Inequality in the World
• History of Racism in the World
• European Expansion (15th-19th centuries)
• Religious History and the Inquisition
• Cultural Exchange in the Iberian World
• Identities in the Portuguese speaking World

Francisco Bethencourt is currently researching the history of inequality in the world. The book on history of racism tested his work on different scales (long term macro approach blended with the analysis of precise conjunctures), as well as his methods of analysing primary textual and visual sources. The book he published on the Inquisition in Italy, Spain, Portugal and Iberian colonies from 1478 to 1834 likewise addressed long term issues and was based on extensive archival sources.

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.

Professor Bethencourt has been interviewed by the BBC World Service, France Inter, Die Zeit, TV1 in Portugal, and Portuguese newspapers.

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

 

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.