Communication and empire: interpreters, networks and archive in early portuguese exploration (ca.1500-1520)

Through different case studies from different observation points across the Portuguese empire and its archive, this dissertation’s focus is the emergence of an early global communication apparatus, that of the Portuguese empire in the sixteenth century, via the lens of some of its most decisive contributors: interpreters. Communication in the Portuguese empire of course included acts of linguistic mediation, in a context of rapidly increasing linguistic friction across this global space and its fringes, be it in Benin, Kongo or Malabar. In this empire in the making, the role multilingual agents played in retrieving information from beyond lusophone circles was as discreet as it was central. Yet by following the circulation of information beyond these fringes and into the imperial communication channels, this dissertation focuses on the processes through which this information made it onto paper, and through correspondence how it arrived in Lisbon, where the documents on which it was contained gradually came to compose the imperial archive. In doing so, this dissertation is hence also focused on the emergence of an archive, that produced by the first generation of multilingual actors who, through their intervention, did not only contribute to fashioning the empire on its fringes, but also left their mark on the archival trails which eventually converged to Lisbon.