Earlier chapters have looked at the merchant group of Buenos Aires in an attempt to discern universal patterns of group origin, recruitment, training, marriage, and kinship. This chapter provides a comprehensive view of an individual merchant's life, the life of his family and that of his firm.

Gaspar de Santa Coloma's economic position, commercial career, and trade patterns make him perhaps the very best merchant to study in detail. He was a moderately successful man, an example of the ‘typical’ porteño merchant. He figured neither among the few merchants of fantastic wealth nor among those who failed dismally in commercial life, but rather within the upper-middle group of wholesalers. In addition to his moderate success, Santa Coloma is an excellent candidate for close study as his commercial life spanned the entire vice-regal period. His business records run from 1778 to 1815, the year of his death, and even beyond. We can therefore trace, with some degree of success, the career of one merchant and one mercantile firm throughout the entire vice-regal period. The patterns of Santa Coloma's trade also make him one of the more interesting merchants to study for he was involved in trade with Spain and with several provinces of the interior.

Don Gaspar de Santa Coloma was born on 6 January 1742 in Casería del Campo, Campijo, a small town near Arciniega in the Basque province of Alava.

The merchants of Buenos Aires were a central force in the economy of the city, its surrounding countryside, and the more distant areas of the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata. As traders, moneylenders and investors, the merchants controlled much of the day to day economic life in the colony. In fact, the colonial economy was dominated by commercial capital. The merchants, in their role as local agents of Spanish mercantile policy, sought exports which were in demand in the markets of Cádiz and Madrid. They were also responsible for the movement of goods from one sector of the region to another. The porteño merchants indirectly maintained the entire communication and transportation network of the region.

Several variables determine the status of individual merchants and groups of merchants. The category of trade (i.e., whether it be wholesale or retail) was a major factor in the economic and social status of a merchant. Porteño merchants ranked themselves into three trade categories – wholesalers, retailers, and suppliers of food – based on economic power and social prestige. The wholesalers, the subject of this study, were the most important of the merchant groups, but within this category the scale of trade ranged from large to small. Of a sample group of 90 merchants participating in wholesale trade, 45 were medium-scale merchants, 18 were large-scale merchants, 23 were medium- to large-scale merchants, and only 4 were small-scale importers. Large-scale merchants had invested large sums of money, from 50,000 pesos up, in commerce.

Although merchants were among the major local beneficiaries of the restructured political and economic system of the last decades of the eighteenth century, the merchant group of Buenos Aires was not created by the new Viceroyalty. Buenos Aires, from the seventeenth century, had a relatively clearly defined and important merchant group, active both in the legal trade authorized by the Spanish Crown, and in contraband dealings with the Portuguese, English and French.

As early as 1597, only seventeen years after the re-establishment of the port city, Portuguese merchants began to import shipments of dry goods and slaves into Buenos Aires. By 1615 several important merchants and their families were established in the city. Included in this group heavily involved in contraband, were Diego de Vega and his son-in-law, Juan de Vergara. Throughout the seventeenth century, porteño trade (usually contraband) was dominated by Portuguese merchants, although occasionally a Spaniard rose to prominence among the merchant ranks. Such a case was that of Miguel de Riglos, a native of Navarre, and one of the principal merchants of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, who had begun his commercial life through his auspicious marriage to the widow of a Portuguese merchant.

It is impossible to estimate the number of men involved in commerce during the seventeenth century, for no census with good occupational information exists for this period.

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.