Haciendas in northern Mexico, the Orinoco llanos, and central Chile, fazendas in the Brazilian sertão, and British and Dutch farms, all were rural establishments devoted to cattle raising. Their purpose was similar, but the ways of achieving it were not. The production of any good requires a particular use of capital, which may be combined in varied ways for different types of rural establishments. The estancias of Buenos Aires raised cattle on open, endless plains to provide beef for urban consumers, and hides, tallow, and jerked beef for export. Land, cattle, other livestock, improvements, and tools were required by all estancias but not to the same extent. Estancias used those items in a particular way, and such use evolved over time.

The evolution of the capital structure of the estancias of Buenos Aires can be traced by studying probate inventories. They were carried out after someone's death in order to determine how much the estate was worth before splitting it among the heirs. Probate inventories have been used by other scholars for different purposes since a few decades ago. Alice Hanson Jones used them for her massive studies of personal wealth in late colonial America, and European scholars mainly for the study of the material culture. Other scholars, however, moved along a similar path: Jan de Vries studied farm operations in the Low Countries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; and David Brading studied the capital structure of the late colonial Mexican haciendas. This literature has inspired several recent studies of the Buenos Aires estancias.