Why would it be worth emphasizing in a very home island bound setting which doesn't even address the middle class residents of the isle. Colonialism went on for over a century before and after.

It would be like emphasizing that Edgar Allen Poe married his thirteen year old cousin when discussing his horror influence. Terrible but hardly germane to the topic.

"Le bon ton" likely had a very direct hand in shaping colonialism, given that they were aristocrats and landed gentry, and given the "season" spent in London was shaped around political networking.

However, I also meant that it was a sort of cultural neo-colonialism: that the British are allowed to present the history of this period as a romantic drama.

People are free. This notion of collective guilt - "the British are allowed" - is terrifying.

Bridgerton at least was written by an American novelist and then made into a TV show by an American director / writer / producer team for an American media company.