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Well, there was this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweatshop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweatshop And also this (which was, fundamentally, an economic ins

• chimeracoder 10y ago
  You can't really use slavery or sweatshops as an argument one way or the other here. Sweatshops were by no means limited to the US. Nor was slavery, for that matter. The main differences is that US slavery was domestic (and mostly contained to the south)[0]. Whereas European imperial powers (England, France, Belgium, etc.) outsourced their slavery, practicing forced relocation of people within their colonies and engaging those colonists in forced labor with the threat of violence[1]. That continued well into the 20th century. [0] Though not as much as people like to think - the North was very happy to make money off of the slave trade, as long as they didn't permanently hold those slaves. [1] One can try to engage in the abstract argument of, "well, is it philosophically better to enslave people within each others' native lands, rather than to bring them all to the seat of the empire and enslave them there", but that's a hair that's not worth splitting, and a far cry from the original statement.