“It’s late stage capitalism!” I hear another influencer say, describing yet another product now made of cheaper materials and shoddier construction. I hear it everywhere, in media and amongst my friends, as shorthand for what feels broken in our world today. There’s an implication that things have gotten worse, that they used to be better.

We think of a time when consumer products were made to last. A fridge could last your whole life, not just one week past the warranty. A time when you could simply purchase a mattress, rather than be forced into a subscription (looking at you EightSleep). A time when the price of a stock was determined by the value of the company, not by how viral its ticker symbol is on Reddit.

These changes are real and lamentable. But they don’t prove that late stage capitalism is worse. To explore that claim we must ask: worse than what? So, let me introduce you to the world of early stage capitalism. Spoiler: it’s terrible.

In Sven Beckert’s Capitalism: A Global History, from which I’ll draw heavily, he lays out the rise of capitalism from 1450 to 1750. During that period the world became more interconnected across oceans and continents, the countryside was transformed to produce for a global market, and the seeds of industrialization were sown. It was also a period of intense violence, social upheaval, and systematic subjugation of labor.

In the Caribbean, capitalism centered on the lucrative production of sugar. To give a sense of scale, in 1665 the value of sugar exported from Barbados was twice the income of the entire English government. More capital was invested in Barbados than all the English colonies combined, including New York, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts.

If you’re like me, you might have grown up assuming the colonies that would make up the future United States were the center of the New World. But from the perspective of England, and many other European powers, the Caribbean was far more consequential, both in terms of profit and politics.

The sugar economy depended entirely on enslaved labor from Africa—and so, in crucial ways, did the rise of capitalism itself. In the 1660s, 90% of all workers in Barbados labored in sugar. Conditions were atrocious, and in fact lethal. The average life expectancy for an enslaved person was 23 years.

The Caribbean islands offered the early capitalists an opportunity they could never find in Europe: the chance to start with a “blank slate,” eliminating local people, customs, and moral constraints, and replacing them with mass agriculture aimed at global markets, merchant-owned private property, and imported, enslaved labor. They were also far from the moral oversight of the church in Europe.

Although these early capitalists took great care to keep some of their practices unnoticed, there was some level of awareness in Europe of the horrors taking place across the Atlantic. In 1791, William Fox published a widely circulated pamphlet encouraging a boycott of tea from the Caribbean. He wrote, “in every pound of sugar used, the produce of slaves imported from Africa, we may be considered as consuming two ounces of human flesh.”

It still took England until 1807 to abolish the slave trade and until 1833 to abolish slavery in the colonies. They replaced it with an “apprenticeship” system, which was essentially slavery under a different name.

I hear echoes today when we consider the poverty wages and dangerous conditions faced by laborers in Bangladesh, Vietnam, and Cambodia who make clothing for global markets. It’s not hidden from those of us in the West, just distant. Although aware, most pay it no mind or justify it with the so-called natural tendency of the free market to find the right price.

Apologists for capitalism will point to the gains in our standards of living through productivity gains and technological development. That angle underlies part of the “late stage capitalism” trope, that we aren’t seeing meaningful change in productivity and growth, just greater extraction. But historically it was far worse.

Between 1600 and 1750, per capita annual economic growth in England was a measly 0.3%. How then did we see such massive demonstrations of wealth by the rulers and merchants? Because the wealth came from extraction of value from coerced labor and slave labor from the Americas to India. Technological development happened at a similarly slow pace, especially compared to the late Industrial Revolution.

But did the quality of life improve during that period? Certainly not for the indigenous people of the Americas. Certainly not for enslaved labor. Even in Europe, the beneficiaries of the wealth redistribution, the average life expectancy declined between 1650 and 1750.

Capitalism’s early expansion was not driven by technological development and productivity growth. Early capitalism’s growth was inextricably tied to slavery and the violent coercion of labor.

I recognize that when someone uses the phrase “late stage capitalism” they aren’t making a comparison to early stage capitalism. But by knowing what came before, we can better hear the echoes of that history reverberating today, recognize them for what they are, and respond accordingly.