The detailed account of the racial aspects of Portuguese and Spanish history and their interplay with religion will be the most unfamiliar and easily the most interesting sections of Bethencourt's work for British and American readers. When he comes to deal with Portugal and Asia, he runs into problems, however, since he treats Portuguese and other European perceptions of, say, India or the Islamic world as mere exercises in bias and stereotyping, or even as rooted in self-interest. All negative observations are treated as evidence of the racist bias of the observers, even when what is being observed is clearly a manifestation of a purely local racism. The Portuguese descriptions of the relative lack of mobility in the traditional Indian caste system and the plight of the untouchables at the bottom may be unsubtle and unsympathetic, but were the Portuguese not right in essence to see it as parallel to a racial hierarchy and one underpinned by an elaborate ideology rooted in the local religion?

Similarly, while we are told at great length about the Portuguese and Christian denigration of black Africans and of the Atlantic trade in them, Bethencourt is coyly evasive about the extensive and long-lasting Arab slave trade and Arab racial attitudes towards the blacks. He accurately notes that many Arab authors denigrated Africans, but the only one he names is a lone geographer who dissented from this. He would have done better to quote directly Ibn Khaldun, one of the founders of sociology and the ablest and most famous of the Arab historians, who saw the black Africans as light-headed and dim-witted and far more willing to become slaves than any other race. Had Ibn Khaldun been a Portuguese, he would surely have been cited and denounced by Bethencourt. We should never make the mistake of automatically portraying our own group as more culpable than its historic enemies. Unless there is good evidence, this is merely an inverted version of the racist error. 

Again, when Bethencourt discusses the premeditated mass murder of the Armenians by the Turks in 1915, seen as the first genocide of the 20th century, he sees it mainly as a Turkish attempt to create a racial nation state, a heartland for Turks alone. This underplays the role of religion, though in fairness he does provide a good discussion of it. Yet as he himself notes the "Kurds could not be submitted to the same level of atrocities since they were Muslims". The Turkish atrocities were extended to    the Syriac Christians, but not to the non-Turkish Laz, who speak a language related to Georgian but are Sunnis. It is as if Bethencourt is still feeling bad about the eventual harsh fate of those Muslims who centuries ago had invaded, looted and settled the Iberian peninsula, but who quite justifiably ended up losing. Their expulsion was, like that of the French settlers in Algeria, a post-colonial phenomenon, the kind of thing that often happens at the end of an empire.  

The real losers in Iberia (as in Algeria) were the Jews, victims down to our own time of a series of vicious combinations of racial and religious anti-Semitism. Which version was espoused by the many peoples without an Aryan racial theory of history — Croatians, Ukrainians, Romanians, Slovaks, Latvians, Lithuanians and Bosnians — who enthusiastically took part in the Holocaust? Francisco Bethencourt has well described the irrational racial nonsense that intensified German anti-Semitism to the point of genocide, but what of their assistants? Despite this omission, his book is well worth reading, particularly for the sections on Iberia.