Although there has been technological innovation applied to the practice of manufacturing overseas, it was not the cause of it.
What, then, was the cause of manufacturing overseas? What made it possible for dirt farmers in China to enter factories and begin producing cheap goods? Surely they didn't use their wooden plows and crude pick axes to build and run those semi-automated assembly lines.
I'm not trying to intentionally be obtuse or facetious. To me, though, it seems obvious that the same technological innovations that allowed unskilled workers here in the U.S. to mass-manufacture goods also allowed unskilled workers in other parts of the world to do the same. The manufacturers replicate the assembly line process elsewhere, and the Chinese or Malaysian or Brazilian workers do roughly the same job, for less pay.
Demand for cheap goods was the ultimate cause, I suppose, but without the technology (that the 3rd world borrowed from us), they peasnts would probably still be farming dirt, wouldn't they?