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Between money, violence and racism: new perspectives on colonial Swiss mercenary migration to South East Asia, 1848Asia, -1914 The historiography of Swiss overseas emigration has tended to ignore the migration of 5,600 Swiss colonial mercenaries who served in the Dutch East Indies between 1848 and 1914. This article argues for conceiving these mercenaries as life-cycle military labour migrants and aims to place them in the migration history of the 19 th century. By combining colonial, migration and mercenary history, this article not only contributes to a revision of the statistics of Swiss emigration, it also provides new perspectives on an entangled history between Switzerland and Southeast Asia. In the first part, the author explains that Swiss military labour migration to the Dutch East Indies was widely practised in the second half of the nineteenth century. In the second part, the aspects of money transfers, violence and racism are harnessed to discuss how fruitful a new perspective is for an entangled Swiss history.Folgt man der Historischen Statistik der Schweiz, so war die Schweizer Überseeauswanderung nach Asien in der Zeit von 1848-1914 unerheblich. 1 Die Zahl der jährlich dorthin emigrierenden Schweizerinnen und Schweizer bewegte sich demnach zwischen drei und 37. 2 Dieser Befund fusst jedoch auf dem zu engen Migrationsbegriff der linearen und langfristigen Siedlungswanderung und blendet folglich die bedeutendste Form der Schweizer Migration nach Südostasien aus: die auf einen bestimmten Lebensabschnitt beschränkte, militärische Arbeitsmigration. 3 Seit der Frühen Neuzeit bot ein transregionaler militärischer 1 Dieser Artikel ist aus einem Vortrag heraus entstanden, den ich an den Schweizer Geschichtstagen (2019) gehalten habe. Ich danke allen Panel-Teilnehmerinnen und Teilnehmern für ihre Fragen und Kommentare. Weitere Aspekte durfte ich in den Geschichtskolloquien der Universitäten Bern und Luzern zur Diskussion stellen, bei deren Teilenehmerinnen und Teilnehmern ich mich ebenfalls bedanken möchte. Ferner danke ich

The largest “multinational” employers (avant la letter) were European India companies and colonial armies. Between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, they recruited millions of mercenaries and soldiers from all over Europe, mostly from lower social classes. Beginning in the nineteenth century, they offered certain welfare-state services to these men and their legitimate and illegitimate families in Europe and the colonies. To maintain these systems, colonial states depended on cooperation with local, regional, and national administrations throughout Europe. However, the economic and welfare-state dimensions of violent European expansion have hitherto hardly been studied. This article uses the example of the Dutch colonial army to show for the first time how much money flowed from the colonies to lower-class European families. It analyses the transimperial networks of the Dutch colonial bureaucracy, and shows why men, women, and children in Europe and Asia, from diverse social backgrounds and subjected to dissimilar racial regimes, were affected quite differently by this global military labour market.

Because of limited human resources at home, the Dutch colonial army recruited up to forty percent of its soldiers outside of the Netherlands. This demand for mercenaries opened up a number of opportunities and challenges for non-Dutch European actors in a transnational military labour market. Among those who took advantage of these opportunities was the Swiss Friedrich Wüthrich. Born into a poor family, he first pursued a military career in the Dutch colonial army. Subsequently, he ran the Hotel Helvetia in the Dutch city of Harderwijk where the recruitment centre of the colonial army was also domiciled. From his hotel, Wüthrich set up an illicit recruitment network and lured young Swiss into the Dutch colonial army. By looking at his life, I examine the opportunities that the violence-infused colonial expansion offered to non-Dutch Europeans, and the repercussions that spread into Europe's hinterland. Het Nederlandse koloniale leger bestond voor ongeveer veertig procent uit soldaten die uit andere Europese landen afkomstig waren, aangezien het in eigen land te weinig soldaten wist te rekruteren. Deze behoefte aan huurlingen bood een groot aantal niet-Nederlandse actoren tal van mogelijkheden om binnen een transnationale, militaire arbeidsmarkt te opereren. Een van de mensen die daarvan dankbaar gebruik maakten, was de Zwitser Friedrich Wüthrich. Afkomstig uit een armlastig gezin probeerde hij allereerst een loopbaan op te bouwen binnen het Nederlandse koloniale leger. Vervolgens werd hij uitbater van Hotel Helvetia in Harderwijk, waar ook het rekruteringscentrum van het koloniale leger was gevestigd. Vanuit dit hotel zette Wüthrich een illegaal rekruteringsnetwerk op, waarmee hij jonge Zwitsers naar het Nederlandse koloniale leger lokte. Aan de hand van zijn levensgeschiedenis onderzoek ik in dit artikel niet alleen de mogelijkheden die de gewelddadige koloniale expansie niet-Nederlandse Europeanen bood, maar ook de repercussies hiervan op Europa zelf. welcome to hotel helvetia! 123 krauer 1 This article was made possible thanks to the generous support of the Swiss National Science Foundation for the project 'Swiss Tools of Empire'. I owe many thanks to Harald Fischer