Blood, Belonging and Power: How do people challenge the institutions that seek to define them?

Join KCL's Centre for Early Modern Studies for the launch of Ana Paula Lloyd’s (KCL) first book, Cross-Cultural Politics and the Suspension of the Portuguese Inquisition, 1674–1681 (Routledge).

The book tells the story of Portugal’s New Christians — descendants of Jews forced to convert to Christianity — and the campaign that led to the unprecedented eight-year suspension of the Portuguese Inquisition. Moving between Portugal and Rome, it follows the New Christians’ political mobilisation and the case they brought before the Roman Inquisition, asking how a population marked out through ancestry and inherited stigma came to act collectively, build political influence across borders and challenge the institution that defined them as suspect.

The conversation will use the book as a starting point to explore wider questions about ancestry, identity and political agency: how do people resist, negotiate or make political use of categories imposed upon them?

Ana Paula Lloyd will be joined by broadcaster and geneticist Adam Rutherford (UCL) and Francisco Bethencourt (KCL), bringing together perspectives from the history of New Christians, racism and empire, and the genetics and politics of ancestry and human difference.

The event will be followed by a drinks reception.

Book Description

This book tells the story of the unprecedented suspension of the Portuguese Inquisition (1674-81), a negotiation that started with a request for a general pardon but quickly developed into a crisis over the legitimacy of the Inquisition itself. This analysis of the denouement in the long struggle between New Christians, as forced converts from Judaism were known in Iberia and their persecutors, the Portuguese Inquisition, moves away from binary and national, religious or economic perspectives, arguing that the suspension was entirely political.

Taking a transnational approach, this book focuses on agency and decision-making, exploring not only the crucial Roman dimension, but examining all the actors involved; from New Christian merchants, Jesuit fathers, Inquisitors and bishops to the cardinals of the Roman Inquisition asking just how it was possible to bring such an apparently powerful institution to the brink and its efforts to defend itself. The book is an in-depth study of negotiators and negotiations. Using the analytical idea of cross-cultural politics, the book shows how liminal groups could use the skills and connections gained through cross-cultural trade, translating economic trust into political leverage, to galvanic effect. The New Christians acted as diplomats for themselves, questioning the Inquisition’s legitimacy and methods, pioneering appeals for minority rights in the face of institutional repression.

This book will be of interest to political and social historians of early modern Europe, Iberian and Italian studies, the Inquisition, Catholicism, and legal histories of rights. It also speaks to scholars of diaspora, transnational history, and minority agency.

Speaker Bios

Ana Paula Lloyd is a Research Associate at King’s College London and an early modern historian of Iberia and global Catholic Europe. Her research focuses on cross-cultural political networks, New Christian agency, and questions of belonging among mobile minority communities. Her doctoral research at King’s examined the unprecedented suspension of the Portuguese Inquisition and the ways New Christians sought justice across borders, negotiated powerful institutions and developed forms of political agency. Her first book, Cross-Cultural Politics and the Suspension of the Portuguese Inquisition, 1674–1681, is published by Routledge.

Adam Rutherford is an award-winning writer, broadcaster and geneticist at University College London. His books include A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, The Book of Humans and the Sunday Times bestseller How to Argue with a Racist. He has written and presented numerous documentaries for BBC radio and television and is a presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week. His work explores genetics, ancestry, race and the ways scientific ideas shape understandings of human difference.

Francisco Bethencourt is Charles Boxer Professor of History at King’s College London and a leading historian of the Portuguese-speaking world and global history. His research has transformed the study of racism, inequality, minorities, merchant cultures and cultural exchange. He is Principal Investigator of the ERC Advanced Grant project New Christian Materiality (1450–1750). His most recent book, Strangers Within: The Rise and Fall of the New Christian Trading Elite (Princeton University Press, 2024), a TLS Book of the Year, examines the crucial role played by descendants of forcibly converted Jews in intercontinental trade within and beyond the Iberian world.