While Edward Said and more recent postcolonial critics have long argued that Austen and  empire are interwoven, what has not yet been fully discussed is the powerful race-making work that Austen’s novels perform and the global significance of this work in forging white subjectivity as universal. Austen’s cultural force is part of the assimilationist, universalizing territorial and cultural conquest of the British empire, promulgating a myth of “originality” that  enables a sweeping universal signifying of Regency whiteness as a desired norm. Jane Austen  and the Making of Regency Whiteness understands Austen as Shakespeare’s heir in this making  of the white, Anglo subject who comes to stand in for the universal human…