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There's been discussion elsewhere of how to deal with issues like imperialism, racism, and sexism in historical novels. I've been mulling. It turns out I'm more comfortable with writing that includes it. There are different ways to handle it, obviously. The most common are that one can have a viewpoint character who is fighting the trend in some way, or there is the much harder thing where the viewpoint character is in some way participating in the system, yet conflicted about it. I can go along with things like that, but my skin crawls a little when it gets ignored entirely or dismissed or the author goes with a wildly ahistorical approach. Novels of the period are of the period; modern historical novels need to address some of the tension between our culture now and how things were. They just do, even if it's only obliquely.