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 19th 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 ; ISSN:0036-7834