> Colonialism and exerting power on a whole peoples is less obvious, and harder to see
Give me examples of colonialism nowadays. Or what you consider colonialism.
For me exploiting is only one thing: forcing the other part to do something under threat or coaction.
Namely: "we should pay more to x, y, z" is not exploiting. Going to them and forcing them to work for us, it is. When someone does not have alternative and you have something to offer, that is not exploiting, even if it looks like little to us. The solution for these people to get more is to have more people trying to employ them, then salaries get higher. This is a relatively slow process, but it happens (it happened in history).
We go to less developed nations because it is cheaper. True. And they benefit from it. Are they worse than us? No, it is just their countries did not reach the same conditions yet. But you would say: hey, we should pay them more, give them a better place to live, blabla, which I get, it is ok, I am with you in part, but there is a problem: people buy the products that are cheaper for the same kind of product. And it makes sense: you will not pay more than you need for something (I mean a meaningful extra amount that limits what you can do, not one cent more or less, of course), since you have a limited amount of money, which is resources.
So at the end you have a chain of supply where if you raise the prices much, people will stop buying. If people stop buying, people in developing countries go unemployed. It is all a chain. So now you would ask: how do you raise the salaries for these people? Letting many employers, I mean as many as possible, enter the country, because that means that employers start competing for the employees and the salaries get higher. They cut on their profits if they cannot find workers.
This is how it works. Many people do not understand it. I have been there, working there, living there in places where this happens. And the difference between some of these people having an employment that is probably three times and health care insurance (I talk about Vietnam, but this happens in many developing countries in similar ways) is that the sister of one of those guys does not end up doing what you are thinking and instead goes to university with the help of the family.
This is the reason why I cannot call that exploiting. They improve their lives, eventually they will learn and compete with us (they already do in some areas or are starting to).
I find very hypocrite people complaining about better conditions for others (we all want that I guess) when it is not them who pay the bill.
There is no replacement for this way of developing IMHO, and it has been the model of success, with all its problems.
Forced redistribution is awful to make people wealthy, even if it looks counter-intuitive, because we all have a tendency to think that if someone has a lot and someone has too little, then we take away from one and give to another.
But what many people do not take into account is that doing that kills the incentive to create the wealth in the first place.