Spanish society in the New World, far from homogeneous and monolithic, was composed of numerous social groups, which varied according to the regions of the Empire. Clergymen, merchants, bureaucrats, artisans and craftsmen, peddlers, innkeepers, and the perpetually unemployed were among the ranks of Spaniards found throughout the colonial realm, especially in urban or semi-urban settings.

Social group differences in the Spanish or white population in the New World were not limited to Lima or Mexico City. In the 1778 census of Buenos Aires, sixteen major occupational and social categories are specifically delineated, and it can be assumed that these groups were present in other small colonial cities as well. The nature of the society in which these varied occupational groups functioned, the amount of interaction between groups, and the degree of social mobility among members of different occupational groups are all matters for study raised by the presence of these disparate groups in Spanish colonial society. This study examines in detail one of these groups, the wholesale merchants (comerciantes) of Buenos Aires.

The choice of time (the late eighteenth century), social group (the merchants), and locale (Buenos Aires) is not accidental. The comerciantes were an especially important and powerful social group in the Río de la Plata, a region which began to emerge from relative isolation in 1750. Merchants were a target group of the Bourbon monarchs who attempted, during the late eighteenth century, to revitalize the economy of the Spanish Empire by overhauling the entire system of colonial trade.