If colonialism was necessary for industrialisation the European powers with no or smaller colonial empires would have had lower growth. Germany would have been behind the U.K. and France. Austria would have been obviously suffering compared to Germany. This didn’t happen. The evidence is ambiguous as to whether Empire had any effect on economic growth and what it had certainly wasn’t large. You can not detect decolonisation’s effect on historical GDP by eye. That’s how significant colonialism was to economic growth in the developed world.
If actually being the government and in charge of other countries, being able to loot them more or less at will, and being able to direct their populations’ labour and economic development did basically nothing why would trade immiserate Asia and Africa?
More to the point, literally every decade since WWII has been the best ever, on every continent, since WWII. Lifespan, healthy lifespan, education and literacy go up on every continent. Every continent but Africa sees growth in GDP per capita and they look like they’re joining that trend now too.
As far as Foxconn goes they have a lower suicide rate than the general Chinese population.
> ABC News and The Economist both have done some simple comparison— although the number of workplace suicides at Foxconn is large in absolute terms, the suicide rate is actually lower when compared to the overall suicide rate of China or the United States. According to a 2011 Centre for Disease Control and Prevention report, the country has a high suicide rate with approximately 22.23 deaths per 100,000 persons. In 2010, the worst year for workplace suicides at Foxconn with a total of 14 deaths, its employee count was a reported 930,000 people. The total number of Foxconn employee suicides in 2010 is unknown.