This article suggests that analyses of child labour today should take as their point of comparison poorer nineteenth-century continental European countries, rather than the more commonly cited analogy of industrializing Britain. Two aspects of comparison between the nineteenth-century Finnish experience and today's developing economies are especially relevant. The first is the role of foreign investors in introducing industrial child labour in the early stages of industrialization. The second is labour migration, and particularly that of children. Industrial child labour in nineteenth-century Finland, and labour migration from Finland to St Petersburg, serve as empirical case studies. Finally, the author suggests that new apologies for industrial child labour in the past can be linked with the late-twentieth-century expansion of child labour.