Strangers within: the rise and fall of the New Christian trading elite
A comprehensive study of the New Christian elite of Jewish origin-prominent traders, merchants, bankers and men of letters-between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuriesIn Strangers Within, Francisco Bethencourt provides the first comprehensive history of New Christians, the descendants of Jews forc...
| Résumé: | A comprehensive study of the New Christian elite of Jewish origin-prominent traders, merchants, bankers and men of letters-between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuriesIn Strangers Within, Francisco Bethencourt provides the first comprehensive history of New Christians, the descendants of Jews forced to convert to Catholicism in late medieval Spain and Portugal. Bethencourt estimates that there were around 260,000 New Christians by 1500-more than half of Iberia s urban population. The majority stayed in Iberia but a significant number moved throughout Europe, Africa, the Middle East, coastal Asia and the New World. They established Sephardic communities in North Africa, the Ottoman Empire, Italy, Amsterdam, Hamburg and London. Bethencourt focuses on the elite of bankers, financiers and merchants from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries and the crucial role of this group in global trade and financial services. He analyses their impact on religion (for example, Teresa de Ávila), legal and political thought (Las Casas), science (Amatus Lusitanus), philosophy (Spinoza) and literature (Enríquez Gomez).Drawing on groundbreaking research in eighteen archives and library manuscript departments in six different countries, Bethencourt argues that the liminal position in which the New Christians found themselves explains their rise, economic prowess and cultural innovation. The New Christians created the first coherent legal case against the discrimination of a minority singled out for systematic judicial inquiry. Cumulative inquisitorial prosecution, coupled with structural changes in international trade, led to their decline and disappearance as a recognizable ethnicity by the mid-eighteenth century. Strangers Within tells an epic story of persecution, resistance and the making of Iberia through the oppression of one of the most powerful minorities in world history. Packed with genealogical information about families, their intercontinental networks, their power and their suffering, it is a landmark study "The New Christians, largely former Jews and Muslims who were forced to convert to Christianity in the 16th and 17th centuries, were both a persecuted group as well as an international elite, and their story, argues Francisco Bethencourt, offers a fascinating and indispensable veiw into the period and the making of a global economy. In what is intended to be an authoritative and innovative book, the author will recount how the New Christians were a major force in structuring the Atlantic economy and reconstruct their involvement in trading system which ran from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. Their hybrid religious allegiances, situated as they were primarilybetween Judaism and Christianity, provide a unique case of cosmopolitanism in various parts of the world. New Christian business practices, forms of organisation and codes of behaviour linked intercontinental networks to local agencies. Their ability to resist religious persecution implied alliances at the highest levels of the Catholic Church and the Iberian monarchies. This book will provide entirely new perspectives for our understanding of cosmopolitanism, religious allegiances, political alliances and business history. The New Christian trading elite has been studied in a fragmentary way, compartmentalised in time and space; but it has never been the subject of comprehensive research over the long term, from the forced conversion of the Jews in Portugal in 1497 to the abolition of the distinction between New Christians and Old Christians in Portugal in 1773, spanning connections between Europe, Africa, Asia and the New World"-- |
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| Description: | Includes bibliographical references and index |
| Description matérielle: | xvii, 602 Seiten, Illustrationen, Karten |
| ISBN: | 978-0-691-20991-3 0-691-20991-X |
