Re: Tech washing!
"In the days of the empire, Indian cotton (Bangladesh was part of India then, of course) was sent to England, where it was turned into cloth in the northern mills."
And _this_ was achieved by shutting down mills in India. The idea was by importing raw product and exporting finished goods, Britain wouldn't bleed money out to the colonies as it was doing when buying in indian cloth.
The thing to bear in mind about colonial exploitation is that for the most part the rich didn't see what they were doing as a problem, because they were treating the foreign poor just the same as they treated the poor back home in England.
As another poster said, we spent a good chunk of the 20th century building up workers' rights from the depredations of mercantilism that had occured over the preceeding 200 years - and the mercantilists have responded by getting into government and spending the last 30-40 years systemically stripping them down again.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
