I definitely think that point of view is reasonable.

While the French and British navy's were powerful and far reaching, they simply enabled the scale of colonialism and slave trade. It was a time when trade seemed the most important development of humanity, slavery was considered just a part of trade, and colonialism was just exploring for more resources to trade. It was considred just normal entrepreneurship of the day and wasn't so much endemic to those European countries. They simply we're prominent and successful in their time. Leaders and countries of other regions dominated the same in other periods of history and other parts of the world during the same period.

I may simply be my romanticizing my country's history in a way to distance it from negative past elements, even shifting blame for our own negative past elements.