Atheist Memes

Well, more broadly, the age of imperial colonialism was bad for pretty much every civilization said empires came into contact with. The Spanish and Portuguese were doing heinous shit for centuries. Later, the Dutch, French, Belgians, Germans, Brits, the US (don’t forget the Native American genocide and the Monroe Doctrine, amongst other things), and others got in on the action (Japan is in this club too, largely taking their inspiration from the Portuguese and the Brits, but for mostly contextual reasons of “they seriously pissed off two much bigger empires right as they were getting into the positive economic feedback loop” - aka the Pacific Theater of WW2 - had their imperial colonial era substantially truncated).

More pointedly: empires existed before the age of European colonialism, but what with the advent of the age of sail, the Europeans unfortunately went down a road that was on average (arguably) far more nakedly exploitative and obviously unsustainable in the long run than any empire in history (excepting the Mongol empire, of course, which was more or less just Genghis doing a huge zerg rush with early-game cavalry and mounted archery units).

TL;DR: any reasonably-stable country in Europe (plus the US) with enough scratch to put together a halfway decent navy was getting in on the action for literal centuries.