The New Spain Fleets: Delving into three centuries of socioeconomic colonial history through Artificial Intelligence

The encounter between Europe and the Americas in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries undoubtedly changed the world. Spain would establish control over most of the Americas, inaugurating the modern global system we live in today. The richness and resources to which the Spanish crown got access were beyond imagination, and establishing the Viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru would enable the creation of a previously unseen and unparalleled social, economic, and political network. This was only made possible through Charles I's mandate to establish the Spanish Fleets that, between 1520 and 1790, carried out all transatlantic voyages between Spain and the Americas.

The Spanish Fleets transported not only gold, silver, and all the traditional riches found in these territories, but also enabled the exchange of all sorts of resources, including plants, animals, foods and most importantly, people and knowledge, both Indigenous and European. This would have unprecedented consequences ranging from population growth in Europe thanks to the introduction of new and highly resistant crops, to the acquisition of new resources and knowledge that would eventually impact the development of areas such as medicine, astronomy, chemistry, geography, history, and literature, among many others, in both sides of the Atlantic. The Spanish Fleets were overseen by the royal institution House of Trade (Casa de la Contratación). It recorded thousands of trips in an extensive document collection that provides invaluable information about the people that shaped these first global networks and the activities that would eventually mould the history of modern Latin America and the world.

This project will create a step-change in the way historical archaeology collects evidence and analyses information while transforming our knowledge about the New Spain Fleets (NSF), one of the most important maritime institutions and infrastructures of early modern history. This will be accomplished by, firstly, making readily available an unprecedented collection with thousands of documents about the NSF in computer-readable format; and secondly, by transforming our knowledge about the Spanish colonial maritime trade through five cutting-edge historical case studies delving into key social, economic, and spatial aspects of the NSF.

Making use of innovative computational methods based on artificial intelligence techniques, the NSF project will 1) create an unparalleled digital collection bringing together thousands of historical documents related to the NSF from two major archives; 2) carry out the semi and automated transcription of this collection, unlocking historical information in thousands of documents; 3) use automated annotation methods to identify, mine, and analyse meaningful information from these sources; 4) create an online platform that will facilitate to any scholar the exploration, query, and extraction of information from the New Spain Fleets documents; and 5) carry out, in five case studies, a series of historical analyses that will substantially advance our knowledge of the social, economic, and scientific revolutions facilitated by the New Spain Fleets.

In doing so, the project will open the opportunity for researchers and the interested public to access information and records that have been only in the remit of specialists in the past. Furthermore, the case studies will explore a series of topics that are far from being comprehensively and completely understood, thus opening a variety of potential new research areas and studies at a scale that is impossible at the moment. These will include the early migration of Indigenous peoples to Europe, the social networks of people in the fleets, the trade routes and the economic impact of the goods transported, the unofficial Spanish slave trade, the commercialisation and study of American plants and animals, and the exchange of scientific ideas about health, disease, and medicine.