In his 1993 book, "Culture and Imperialism", the American literary critic Edward Said implicated "Mansfield Park" in Western culture's casual acceptance of the material benefits of slavery and imperialism. He cited Austen's failure to mention that the estate of Mansfield Park was made possible only through slave labour. Said argued that Austen created the character of Sir Thomas as the archetypal good master, just as competent at running his estate in the English countryside as he was in exploiting his slaves in the West Indies. He accepted that Austen does not talk much about the plantation owned by Sir Thomas, but contended that Austen expected the reader to assume that the Bertram family's wealth was due to profits produced by the sugar worked by their African slaves. He further assumed that this reflected Austen's own assumption that this was just the natural order of the world.