Abstract 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.