Austen and imperialism

Edward Said helped launch post-colonial criticism of Austen, arguing that Sir Thomas Bertram’s expedition to Antigua, apparently accepted so casually by Austen and her characters, shows that she was an imperialist at heart. Simply by virtue of his standing in English society, Said argued, Sir Thomas has the right to extend his dominion to the other side of the world.

This argument fails to recognize the importance of the disorder caused by Sir Thomas’s absence of Mansfield Park. And if we can, following the argument of Roger Sales, take Mansfield Park as political allegory of royal absenteeism in Regency England, then the book makes precisely the opposite point that Said sees: Austen implies that Sir Thomas would have been better off attending to the moral education of his daughters and the maintenance of his own house than pursuing adventures across the sea.