A Study of Sir Thomas’s Estate in Antigua: Empire and Domestic Order in Mansfield Park

This article examines Sir Thomas Bertram’s Antiguan estate in Mansfield Park as a key yet largely unspoken foundation of domestic order in early nineteenth-century Britain. Drawing on postcolonial criticism, particularly Edward Said, it argues that the novel’s silence surrounding slavery and plantation life does not indicate ignorance but reflects the normalisation of imperial culture within everyday domestic life. By reading the disruption and restoration of household order in parallel with the management of colonial property, the article demonstrates that empire functions not as an external backdrop but as an internalised structural condition of the novel’s moral economy.