The point of US civil war was that the industrialized North wanted to rid of slavery and the agricultural South wanted to go on with slave-dependent growing of cotton etc.
Likewise, places where formal abolition of slavery was more recent (e.g. Kingdom of SA and Yemen until 1962, Oman until 1970, etc) are hardly industrial nations.
(Yes, this is not the complete picture and things are not straightforward or simple: compare to slave labor in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, etc, where some of it was used in industrial-type activities, and even R&D, as described by Solzhenitsyn in In The First Circle; however, you could describe these as solutions for war-time economy, and not sustainable.)
And also, I see that argument and my take away is that the solution to our economic woes is to sabotage the industrial sector of places like China.
Liberal immigration policy and real opportunity (because of the previous) lead to an influx of people probably above average in their motivation / skills which probably helped a lot too. I wish we'd remember this lesson today...
I'm not trying to discount American culture / ideals. I love living in San Francisco because of this - most of the good of American culture without many of the downsides.
You mean "play fair" as in "please do like we say and let your billion people be poor and eat raddish all year long"?
This is a joke. From Chinese (and most other parts of the world) standing point, the West has never played fair. It started with drug war, when British cannons forced the Chinese customs to open the doors to opium boats. Then it was nuclear power, when everyone was asked to NOT do as the US did and not try to get their hands on nukes. Now that Chinese people finally have their industrial revolution, and can start getting their head out of the mud, you're asking them to "play fair" and stop working hard because they are "stealing" your jobs? You are probably asking them to not buy 2 cars per family, to not use washing machine to wash their clothes, and to not take planes to discover the world's nice places, right? So it is pure "do like we say, do not do like we do", right?
A joke, I say.