In 1799 Dr Juan José de Gamboa, an influential canon of the cathedral chapter in Mexico City, presented a lengthy petition on behalf of the Marquesa of Selva Nevada seeking permission to found a Carmelite convent in Querétaro, a city of some 30,000 inhabitants. Whereas the capital possessed twenty wealthy convents with over nine hundred professed nuns, Querétaro only had two established houses, the Santa Clara and the Capuchines. Marvelling that, whereas in France the Revolution had destroyed convents, in Mexico the Church was still able to found new houses, the crown attorney advised granting the necessary licence. A handsome edifice was subsequently designed and constructed by Manuel Tolsa, the chief proponent of the neo-classic style in New Spain, and in 1803 the Archbishop accompanied the founding sisters on their journey from Mexico to Querétaro.

Extreme nationalism and a web of conspiracy theories make it particularly difficult to distinguish history from myth for the experience of foreign finance in Argentina. Julio Irazusta agrees with Raúl Scalabrini Ortíz that the London Loan of 1824 (the Baring Loan) was part of a system of spoliation, on a continental scale, by which Britons and their Government exacted full payment for the recognition of the newly independent Republics. Ortega and Duhalde report a gentleman’s agreement between London bankers in the mid-1802s; Hispanic America was to be partitioned into spheres of influence and Baring Brothers were left with the River Plate. The British loans of the 1820s were intended to tie the new Republics firmly to Britain; default was welcome, since ‘guarantees’ could then be enforced by Britain's armed might. Baring Brothers are condemned for failing to pay up the full proceeds of the 1824 loan to Buenos Aires, for plotting to overthrow Juan Manuel de Rosas, for negotiating a harsh settlement of the debt in 1857, and for intervening in one way or another at every stage in the politics and economics of Argentina, even to the extent of promoting the Paraguayan War.

Between the 1850s and 1880s, Argentina became one of the chief suppliers of wool to the expanding world markets. Most of this wool was grown in the fertile sheep-runs of the richest province in the country, and was sent to Europe through its capital city and port, Buenos Aires.

After the colonial experience of being mainly an entrepôt in the legal and contraband trade between the Viceroyalty of the River Plate and the rest of the world, Buenos Aires had seen its commercial opportunities flourish after Independence, and had found in its rural hinterland the staples to export, hides and salted beef. A mercantile class, at the rise of the century more interested in commercial pursuits than in productive activities related to the rural areas, had, nevertheless, sought in the late colonial era the benefits of cattle-raising, which provided the new staples, first to complement and later to replace the chief export of colonial Buenos Aires, bullion from Potosí.