Moral and economic entrepreneurship in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe.

Switzerland is arguably one of the most globalized countries in the world. It consistently ranks among the world’s top 10 foreign investors, with a potent finance sector, vibrant commodity trading industries, and global recognition for its cheese, chocolate, tennis champions, and top-ranked universities. A full twenty-five percent of its population consists of ‘foreigners’ and almost 40% of its inhabitants have at least one parent who was born abroad. Yet, a systematic historiographical analysis of how this politically neutral, land-locked country with a remarkably strong sense of national exceptionalism was, ironically, always at the forefront of European expansion and globalization is still largely absent.

In a ground-breaking move, this proposed research project systematically breaks away from conventional national and Eurocentric approaches to Swiss history. It thereby also offers a new perspective on European imperial history more broadly conceived. The reason for this is simple: Switzerland could only participate in imperial globalization because its larger imperial neighbors were always open to Swiss emigrants, investors, missionaries, mercenaries, merchants, and many others who sought opportunities in Europe’s larger imperial formations. The case of Switzerland makes visible, in other words, how European imperial expansion was not only driven by undeniable national competition, but also by intra-European border crossing collaboration. In a sense, the case of Switzerland sheds light on processes and structures of European economic, cultural, and social integration through mutual and collaborative imperial expansion. This project thus investigates European integration through collaborative expansion through the lens of Switzerland. It focuses on three regions that saw a particularly strong and long Swiss presence throughout the 19th century:

Mangalore in the erstwhile South Canara region of British India (coastal Karnataka today), where the Basel Mission established an extensive network of mission stations, factories, schools, and a trading company;
the Kingdom of Lesotho in Southern Africa, which entered into a symbiotic relationship with Swiss missionaries from the Paris Evangelical Mission Society during the realm’s struggle against advancing Boer states and British colonialism; and
Bahia and Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, which saw the influx of one of the largest Swiss merchant communities of the era that then became involved in a variety of activities ranging from the running of (slave) plantations, philanthropy to modernizing infrastructure to the export of cash crops.

Methodologically this project proposes crucial advances. All three sub-projects will collaborate with universities from the above-mentioned countries, examine sources in European and non-European languages, and interpret them for academic and broader audiences within and without Europe. Offering insights into how our shared histories differentially affect populations in Western Europe, Latin America, Southern Africa, South Asia and beyond opens up new possibilities on building common futures in a globalizing world.

Employees

Bernhard C. Schär held the position of SNSF Eccellenza Professor from 2022 to 2025, where he led an international research group dedicated to developing a “collaborative history of global Switzerland” at the Institute of Political Studies, University of Lausanne. Since December 2025, he has served as Chair of Modern and Contemporary History at UniDistance Suisse. His project involves the following collaborators:

Izabel Barros, doctoral researcher (UNIL)

Her dissertation, entitled “Motherhood and Slavery: A Global Microhistory of a Swiss-Owned Plantation in Bahia (1820-1888)” explores the intersections of gender, slavery and transimperial history. With a professional background in feminist peacebuilding and quilombo and indigenous rights advocacy in Brazil, she is also involved in public history and community activism through collectives such as Taoca and the Berner Rassismus Stammtisch. She is one of the initiators and co-authors of the interactive mapping project Bern Kolonial (2020). Her work bridges academic research with transdisciplinary outreach, focusing on global histories, decolonial and postcolonial studies and intersectionality.

Léa Boldo, MA, student assistant (UNIL)

Léa Boldo is doing her master’s degree in the faculty of political science with a focus on transnational history, where she’s interested in history of XIX-XX centuries and international politics.

Philipp Krauer, PhD, associated postdoctoral researcher (UNIL)

Philipp Krauer is an associated post-doc researcher working on the development of automated text recognition tools to analyze handwritten historical sources. Since 2021, he has worked as an archivist at the State Archive of Schwyz. He completed his PhD at ETH Zurich in 2021 with a dissertation titled “Swiss Mercenaries in the Dutch East Indies: A Transimperial History of Military Labour 1848-1914.“ Additionally he is a co-founder of the public history project zh-kolonial.ch. For his research Krauer received the 2023 “Young Scholar Award” from the Walter Benjamin Kolleg at the University of Bern and together with Bernhard C. Schär he was awarded the Gold Prize for early career researchers by the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences (SAGW-AAHS) in 2024.

Fabio Rossinelli, PhD, postdoctoral researcher (UNIL)

From 2013 to 2019, he worked at the University of Lausanne (UNIL) as a research and teaching assistant, where he conducted his doctoral thesis on Switzerland’s involvement in colonial imperialism during the 19th century. He received the Whitehouse Prize for the quality of his work. Since 2020, he continues his activities as a post-doc researcher at the University of Italian Switzerland (USI) on the topic of migration remittances between 1750 and 1950. Two years later, he joined Prof. Bernhard Schaer’s team at UNIL on the project presented here. He also collaborates with other institutions, such as the Museum of Ethnography in Geneva (provenance research) and the Italian Geographical Society in Rome (missionary history).

Amal Shahid, PhD, postdoctoral researcher (UNIL)

Her research focuses on the Basel India Mission. She completed a PhD in International History from the Geneva Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies. Her doctoral research explored colonial governance of famine relief in the North-Western Provinces of India between c. 1860-1920, with a focus on labour regulation. During her doctoral studies, she obtained more than three years of teaching experience in interdisciplinary courses. Amal also trained in basic quantitative methods during her Masters in Economic History (research) at the LSE. Her research interests are history of imperialism and colonialism, history of labour, and history of political economy.

Project duration

01.01.2022 - 31.12.2026

Persons

Prof. Dr Bernhard C. Schär

Main institution

Research project funded by the Swiss National Foundation “Moral and economic entrepreneurship in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe. A collaborative history of Global Switzerland c. 1830-1900”

Principal investigator: Prof. Dr. Bernhard C. Schär