SOURCE: “Jane Austen and Empire,” in Contemporary Marxist Literary Criticism, edited by Francis Mulhern, Longman Group, 1992, pp. 97-113.

In the following essay originally published in 1989, Said evaluates Mansfield Park as a pre-imperialist text.

We are on solid ground with V. G. Kiernan when he says that ‘empires must have a mould of ideas or conditioned reflexes to flow into, and youthful nations dream of a great place in the world as young men dream of fame and fortunes.’¹ It is, I believe, too simple and reductive a proposition to argue that everything in European and American culture is therefore a preparation for, or a consolidation of, the grand idea of empire that took over those societies during ‘the age of empire’ after 1870 but, conversely, it will not do to ignore those tendencies found in narrative, or in political theory, or in pictorial technique that enable, encourage, and otherwise...