Well. That whole thing about exploitation and coercion is more true of the present day, when the general population is being squeezed dry through taxes, levies, and inflation to finance all sorts of nonsense (not even beautiful, monumental structures built to last forever), such as wind turbines, politicians’ salaries, NGOs, and so on and so forth. In pre-industrial times people were so poor that such projects (which, moreover, spanned generations, thereby spreading the burden) were of little interest to them: wealthy merchants, guilds etc. donated for reasons of prestige, while the general population typically worked as craftsmen for wages. The notion of a mass of starving have-nots hauling stones under the whip of the authorities is just as false as the idea that sub-Saharan Africa is so poor because the colonial powers exploited it.