New England was never a “slave society”—where slaves
  performed the bulk of labor—but it depended heavily on
  slavery nonetheless, due to its economic entanglement
  with the Caribbean. As a crucial supplier of provisions
  to the sugar islands, New England, one captain
  observed, was truly “the key of the Indies without
  w[hi]ch Jamaica, Barbados & the Caribee Islands are not
  able to subsist.”

Something that, we should note, still occurs to a degree today. At the end of the last century it was an outcry over sweatshops in, particularly, impoverished countries. These past several years over where and how our electronic products are produced. Deliberately or not, wealthier nations and people are still exploiting poorer nations and people by a similar dynamic as New England and the Indies.