Estancia operations, their capital structure, the conditions of production, and the human action required by livestock raising on them have been described in the preceding Chapters. The economic results of all those factors should be considered now. At a microeconomic level, estancia operations resulted in profit; at a macroeconomic level, the overall result of estancia production can be traced by the ability of estancia-produced goods to reach overseas markets. Estancia profits are the subject of this chapter, and the markets for estancia-produced goods are the subject of Chapter 12. Linking both levels are prices and marketing conditions, which are dealt with in Chapter 11.

The traditional vision of Latin American rural estates as prestigeoriented rather than profit-oriented concerns has been increasingly challenged in recent decades. Studies of haciendas for both the late colonial period and the nineteenth century have shown that criteria used to run them were not necessarily different from those used to run other businesses. Eighteenth- or nineteenth-century business criteria may differ from present ones but still be sound in their day. Belgrano's criticism of the Rio de la Plata merchants who would “buy at four and sell at twenty” was the view of an intellectual, a merchant's son but not a merchant himself, a man trained at Salamanca rather than behind the store counter. The overpricing practice of those merchants may have spared them some customers and markets, but it was not out of place in a world with poor communications, affecting both the dissemination of information and the transportation of goods.