The emergence of a large and powerful merchant group in Buenos Aires was an eighteenth-century phenomenon, a response to world demand for hides and silver, population growth in the area, and the expansion of trade and commerce. Study of the eighteenth-century porteño merchants illustrates many characteristics which can be contrasted to those of other merchants within the Hispanic world. Comparison of the merchants of vice-regal Buenos Aires with those of late eighteenth-century Mexico, and even those of sixteenth-century Lima and sixteenth-century Seville leads to the discerning of some patterns of behavior which were universal for the Hispanic merchant as well as those which were unique to time and place.

The porteño merchants, like other merchant groups, were educated men, knowledgeable in accounting and interest rates, who worked full-time at buying and selling. All merchants traveled to some degree, although merchants tended to become less nomadic in well developed urban centers. Neither the merchant of the sixteenth century nor of the eighteenth century was limited only to wholesale transactions, and all groups engaged in retail sales, moneylending and credit operations, and debt collection. Partnership arrangements remained the same throughout the colonial Hispanic world, but unlike their peers in Lima, the porteño merchants did not engage in currency speculation to any large degree, perhaps because by the eighteenth century the silver peso had become standard throughout the colonies.