Yeah gulags and other forced work camps also come to mind. But I guess this is a larger scale in terms of man hours

Never ended, just changed in form.

> If someone asked what is 'the largest theft of labor in human history' I would have thought slavery.

Then I take it you're interested in factual information as to whom the biggest slavers were, which country was the last to abolish slavery (an african one, in the 1980s) and in which countries, today, there are still people selling slaves.

No actually it's when someone copies that blog post you did about react.js and puts it into a dataset, I'm not sure how they sleep with themselves the absolute monsters

Slavery is a weird one. It has been there for longer than any written history exists. In ancient times (Greece, Rome), slaves didn't have rights at all. A horrific injustice but it'd be not be a theft. Then you get the serfdom in the middle ages. Up to recent times humans have been brutally exploited.

The copy part was a recognized right, then taken away.