The English in South America (Buenos Aires: Standard Office, 1878; reprint New York: Arno Press, 1977), 14; 16; 600. For Robert Marret the «golden age» of British investment and enterprise in Latin America was from about 1825 until 1913. See his Latin America: British Trade and Investment (London/Tonbridge: Charles Knight and Co, 1973), 5-12. See also Rory Miller, Britain and Latin America in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London: Longman, 1993); and Alan Knight, «Britain and Latin America», in The Oxford History of the British Empire, ed. Wm. Roger Luis, 5 vols (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1999), III, The Nineteenth Century, ed. Andrew Porter and Alaine Low, 122-45; for a broader perspective, see Martyn Lynn, «British Policy, Trade, and Informal Empire in the Mid-Nineteenth Century», ibid., 101-21.

For a discussion of the contention between dependency theorists and historians preferring a more empirical approach to research on Britain's role in Latin America, see Rory Miller «Informal Empire in Latin America», in The Oxford History of the British Empire, V, Historiography, ed. Robin W. Winks and Alaine Low, 437-49.

For further considerations of Anglo/Hispanic cultural differences or, in James Dunkerley's words, «cultures in contention», see his Americana: The Americas in the World, around 1850 (London/New York: Verso, 2000), 99-242. According to Dunkerley mid-century British trade was greatest with Brazil, Chile, Cuba/Puerto Rico and Peru (319).

Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Sab, ed. Catherine Davies (Manchester/New York: Manchester U. P., 2001), 55.

Roland T. Ely, Comerciantes cubanos del siglo XIX (Havana: Librería Martí, 1961), 66.

Sab, 197.

Catherine Davies, «The Gift in Sab», Afro-Hispanic Review, 22:2 (2003), 46-53.

Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), 114. For further information on British interests in Cuba, particularly the activities of Richard Madden, Judge-Arbitrator of the International Court for the Suppression of the Slave Trade in the late 1830s, see my «Introduction», in Sab, 8-9.

In his perceptive «Masculinidad y nación en la narrativa decimonónica: el caso de Sab y Aves sin nido», Torre de Papel, 8:2 (1998), 39-72, César Valverde makes the important point that the old Cuban oligarchy is represented as castrated masculinity in the ineffective figure of the «señor de B», Carlota's father. For Valverde, Sab and Teresa are endowed with aggressive masculine attributes, while I would argue that the novel posits a comprehensive reconfiguration of gender by reformulating conventional gender differences.

Quoted in Rojer Zapata, «El indio, nacimiento y evolución de una instancia discursiva», Imprévue, 2 (1994), 195-211 (p. 197).