Consuming China: Imperial Trade and Global Exchange in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park

According to postcolonial critics, Jane Austen’s 1814 novel Mansfield Park is an imperial text. In Culture and Imperialism; Edward Said contends that it is complicit with Britain’s colonial enterprise, and through its references to the slave trade in the West Indies and similar exploitation at home, it reflects what he calls a “domestic imperial culture” (93). While feminist scholars, such as Susan Fraiman and Ruth Perry, claim the novel condemns imperialism more than Said acknowledges, recent critics continue to read it in this fashion; for instance, Jon Mee claims that it embraces a nationalistic vision of England, while Saree Makdisi aligns it with Britain’s expanding imperial ventures abroad. However, the current critical conversation does not adequately address Austen’s allusions to China, a colonial context that is as important as the Caribbean trade for understanding the novel. British diplomacy and commerce with China in the early nineteenth century constituted an informal empire, yet one that allowed for and encouraged exchange (Chang 9). As Peter Kitson explains in Forging Romantic China, relations between the two countries were “governed by global flows of trade and existing networks of collaboration” (2). He contends that this interplay of trade and exchange necessarily complicates “any simple and straightforward binaries between colonial self and colonized others” (Kitson 16). China’s cultural prestige had long grounded a strong consumer demand for Asian products in the West, which in turn challenged Britain’s imperial views of the country and compelled it to recognize China’s economic and political strength (Kitson 17). As Britain constructed its national identity through its encounters with the East, it came to see itself as part of a larger global network (Kitson 2–3). Building on Kitson’s model, I argue that Austen employs the China trade to provide critical commentary on a British class system rooted in imperialism. In Mansfield Park, she presents a domestic story of trade and cultural exchange that serves as an allegory of Britain’s relations with the East. Adopted as a child into the household of her wealthy uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram, Fanny Price grows up an outsider amongst her upper-class relatives at their country estate of Mansfield Park. Austen satirizes the Bertrams’