ABSTRACT
The colonial layers of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park rehearse public sphere debates she was clearly conversant in: the Mansfield ruling and abolition, Jacobinism, and education reform, especially through widely disseminated children's texts, and published sermons that equated reform with morality and ethics. The fundamental social problem raised by Mansfield Park is the cost of colonialism, the very thing that off-balances its production of wealth. But the novel does not focus on empire-building per se; rather, it examines colonial thinking. The connection between land enclosure, factory ownership and landlord absenteeism and colonialism can be seen in the fact that these are also the hallmarks of West Indian plantations. Colonialism acts as a metaphor for understanding the complexities of familial relation: in a colonial situation, value is encoded as racial and class difference, but in the Bertram family first cousins are differentiated as belonging to the master or slave class.
