1Francisco Bethencourt, Charles Boxer Professor at King’s College London, is the author of Strangers Within. This voluminous and painstakingly researched monograph stands at the intersection of Bethencourt’s intellectual and academic interests, mediating three strands of debates where the author has left his intellectual mark. The first strand is that of the history of the Inquisition, particularly in Europe, from a global and comparative perspective. The second strand examines the impact of European values and institutions in the buildup of the Portuguese Empire. And the last strand delves into the sociological result of zones of contact in the longue-durée, with one of its most severe outcomes being racism. This book is thus the corollary of forty years of archival research and historiographical interventionism.

2The main research question that guides this work is twofold. On the one hand, it inquires about the trajectories of New Christians, particularly of the elites, over time, in a process of shifting transformations that start with the expulsion and forceful conversion of Jewish groups in Spain and Portugal, moving towards persecution, accommodation, and the so-called disappearance of the group as a whole. On the other hand, the author seeks to understand how these shifts over time contributed in a meaningful way to three historical processes: the constitution of a mercantile elite with a defined mercantile culture; the transformation of experiences of persecution and trauma into social mechanisms of cultural and political repression/survival; and the way merchant culture and repression/survival formatted a path dependency into the racialization of the group and consequent societal and institutional discrimination that became all-encompassing when it turned into a political project. Violence and negotiation, in their different iterations, stood at the very core of these processes.

3Bethencourt answers these questions with an analytical grid that is chronologically organized and that relies on the consultation of about eighteen different archives and libraries in different countries, whereby the written evidence for claims and arguments are overwhelming. Curiously, even though much of the information arises from trial records of the Iberian Inquisitions, Bethencourt adeptly balances the object of his study as passive and active agents in their own history, rescuing the reader from yet another book about the platitudes of New Christians as solely victims of the Inquisitions and the monarchies they served. He complements this wealth of written information and thick analytical grid with unusual complementary insights into the materiality of the New Christian historical path, underlining the inextricable way in which institutional sources are corroborated or disavowed by the echoes brough about by objects and practices of individual daily lives.

4The main findings of this work, that I also endorse, regard the fact that New Christians were not, but became, an ethnically differentiated group through the interplay of exo-identity formation with discriminatory and prosecutorial actions, part of a socio-political project, with ergo-identities that were ill-defined and porous. This interplay rooted a form of internalised racism as perhaps the most crucial attack on the universality of Christian dogma as an egalitarian society under God. The end of Christian Humanism started during this process, never to be regained again. Furthermore, the relational spheres that New Christians had to endure underwent transformations through time and space. Power, in its social and political framing, was crucial to either ease or accentuate persecution, exclusion, and violence. These experiences, in turn, shaped lived identifications, although scholars may contend about how these processes affected notions and emotions regarding belonging, agreeing, disagreeing or nuancing Bethencourt’s own views.

5Where this book will open the door to fruitful discussions is the conceptualization of the role New Christians played in Early Modern societies, particularly the contribution of the group to their own positionality; the intrinsic value of studying New Christians as a group (and in some cases even as a corporate assemblage as normal in societies of the Ancien Régime); and the relevance of contextualising the societal behaviour of members of the New Christian group as individuals, rather than as members of a group. Crucial to this discussion stands the emphasis and value attributed to mobility. Bethencourt posits in his book that New Christians were doubly marginalised and excluded because of their religious construed markers and because they were mobile, meaning in the context of his assertion that they moved geographically. Although agreeing with this premise, I would argue that the type of mobility that heavily contributed to the exclusion, racialisation, and racism against New Christians was far more complex than geographical mobility alone.

6Human societies in general, starting with our own, are averse to mobility. They are averse to migrants and refugees because they move around geographically, just as they are averse to tourists and expats because they tend to blur local traditions and memories of what people imagine to be collective identities. However, negative discourses, thoughts, and political actions are mostly aimed at migrants and refugees because they epitomise the multiple perceived dangers of mobility. Like the New Christians, they are able to move, under a great deal of duress. Economic migrants are particularly targeted for their use of geographical mobility to dare to dream of economic and social upward mobility by seeking a better way of life elsewhere in the world. Similarly to economic migrants, New Christians were geographically mobile. They aspired to social upward mobility, which they achieved by accumulating social and financial capital and by pursuing professions that fell outside the control of institutionalised authorities, including most liberal professions, trading, and financing. Here too, they strategically manoeuvred away from institutionalised laws and social impositions to freely exercise their trades. But mobility did not stop there. Some New Christians were able to manoeuvre themselves into the vicinity of political powers, even within the Church, through their services. This transition from professional proficiency to the political sphere once again added another layer of mobility.

7The reason why human societies are averse to mobility arises from the fact that mobile peoples are difficult to control in terms of behaviour and social agreements. They become intermediaries between sedimentary and dynamic groups and worlds that tend to speak different cultural and political languages. This position as broker, fixer, or intermediary weaves a network of entanglements that are difficult to describe, but very tangible in daily experiences. If brokering mobilities is a privileged position in any society, it is also the role where one is most vulnerable. This vulnerability, like the mobility itself, is multifaceted. One is vulnerable to the institutional and social rules that, with varying degrees of force, are imposed upon the worlds one tries to intermediate. Vulnerability also extends to one’s own group. In a world of brokers, competition is of the essence, and the exploitation of each other’s vulnerabilities is an advantage in a harsh world. For example, the crackdown on merchant elites in Portugal in 1618 (beginning with Porto) stemmed from a dispute between two powerful New Christian families (and their Sephardic relatives) in France and the Dutch Republic. Their chosen battleground was Portugal, and their weapon of choice was the Inquisition. However, the fight was about debts, trading rights, and tax farming arrangements in the South Atlantic and Asia. The service the Inquisition provided to one of these groups by eliminating the competition was seen by the king in Madrid as a serious misuse of the institution for the benefit of certain members of the New Christian group, and the Inquisitor was summoned to Madrid for being so easily manipulated.

8The interdependency of a community increases personal vulnerability, particularly when the survival of the smaller group, the nuclear family, relies on the familial ties one has across the various realms of mobility. However, in the cases highlighted in Strangers Within, individualistic behaviour often prevailed, sometimes resulting in the protection of the nuclear family, the genealogical family, and their networks, and sometimes simply resulting in self-preservation. Considerations of group or community loyalty faded as quickly as one's own “moral” behaviour. I do not believe that historians will ever fully understand the sense of belonging experienced by New Christian men, women, and children. We can speculate, but we simply do not know (and I believe we must come to terms with that). However, this sense of belonging did not prevent a group of individuals (rather than a community) who were excluded, racialised, and discriminated against from behaving in very similar ways to their counterparts in “mainstream” society. In terms of business, for example, they were no different from Italian, German, Dutch, English, or French trading “nations”. Their added value and competitive advantage arose from their liminal, multifaceted, vulnerable mobilities, which the others lacked.

9The end of the War of Spanish Succession (1713-1715) marks the beginning of the decline of the New Christian identity. It will take another 20 years for the institutionalisation of this process. Perhaps alternatively to the suggestion in Strangers Within, the New Christian identity never truly disappeared, but rather two processes culminated in the early 1720s that drove them out of prominence. Firstly, the New Christian elite in Portugal and Spain was bankrupted because their extended families in the Dutch Republic and London, who were the primary financiers through direct loans and/or property ownership of public debt for the major contenders in the war, defaulted. As late as 1756, the Lopes Suasso family was still petitioning the States General in The Hague to be reimbursed for their loans to William III, as the States General had acted as guarantor for both debts. This decline in economic power, coupled with the rapid growth and aggressive expansion of British and Dutch firms in markets previously dominated by the New Christians, heavily contributed to their fading from public view. As is often the case in life, what is out of sight is usually out of mind.

10I was privileged to read parts of this book in draft form, and I am delighted to see the book being published. As expected from Bethencourt’s work, it is a book to which people cannot remain indifferent. He voices strong views on his sources and current literature on Early Modern Jewish, Sephardic and New Christian communities worldwide, and challenges entrenched ideas, particularly in Iberian scholarship, about the New Christians and their place in society. Scholars will be talking about this book for the years to come, and heated debate will ensue, I am confident, for the general betterment of scholarship in this and related subjects.