This paper looks at some of the new ways in which Jane Austen is being read today—bringing her out of the seclusion of a pastoral pre-industrial England and placing her in the grid of a globe, where slave routes and trade routes were intersecting in the oceans, and large parts of the world were being commercially explored by Britain before they were actually colonized. It tries to examine `postcolonial' as a term and cites examples to show how the postcolonial perspective has changed the ways we look at the texts of 18th and 19th century British fiction. The paper also takes note of the sudden spurt in films either directly based on Jane Austen's novels or obliquely drawing from them.

Traditionally, one of the pleasures of reading Jane Austen's novels was the setting: a green English countryside with neatly trimmed hedgerows, where the life of the gentry appeared genteel, orderly and neatly stratified, the landscape as yet unsullied by factory smoke, and the culture uncontaminated by people from the colonies. Jane Austen lived in and wrote about pre-empire days in Britain. The definitive edition of Jane Austen's novels edited by R W Chapman in 1923, foregrounded this aspect of her work, enlisting Jane Austen into the services of the post-First-World-War national nostalgia of the British people. Chapman placed Jane Austen alongside Samuel Johnson as a monument to the redemptive glory of England's bygone days, and this had long-lasting effects both on the scholarly as well as popular responses to her work.

Reading her in the new millennium, it is difficult for us to overlook the fact that in the late 218th century, when Jane Austen was growing up, England's economy was already inextricably tied up with territories overseas. Long before the empire was consolidated under the crown, there were trade interests in India, investments in plantations in the West Indies and other parts of the world. In recent Jane Austen studies, we see an attempt to dislodge Jane Austen—once seen as the epitome of self-sufficient Englishness—from her safe and sanitized countryside with its manor houses and their well-maintained gardens and relocate her within the frame of a chaotic and bustling world outside the temperate zone, where fortunes were being made, empires founded, epidemics encountered, trade routes opened up, and slaves transported across oceans to work in the sugar plantations in the new world

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