Colonialism in Switzerland refers to the historical involvement of Switzerland and Swiss citizens in European colonialism, despite Switzerland never possessing formal colonies of its own. While Switzerland maintained official neutrality and did not establish overseas territories, Swiss individuals, companies, and investors participated extensively in colonial enterprises, including the Atlantic slave trade, plantation slavery, and colonial commerce from the 17th to the 20th centuries.
The concept of colonialism in the Swiss context challenges the traditional narrative of Swiss neutrality and exceptionalism, revealing how Swiss citizens and capital were integrated into global colonial networks despite the country's official non-participation in imperial ventures.
Definition and characteristics In its broadest sense, colonialism can be defined as the domination of one people by foreigners from another culture. European colonialism, however, possessed three distinctive characteristics that distinguished it from earlier forms of territorial expansion. First, it involved the domination of distant dependencies based on the interests, usually economic, of metropolitan centers. Second, colonizers and colonized remained foreign to each other, unlike earlier empires where conquest typically led to cultural fusion. This separation was justified in the 19th century through racial hierarchy theories, supposedly inevitable and insurmountable. Third, European colonialism was elevated, from the 16th century onward, into an ideology glorifying the accomplishment of a civilizing mission, claiming European technical and cultural superiority gave both the right and duty to "civilize" supposedly inferior peoples.
Between the early 15th century and the late 1930s, colonial Europe extended its domination over nearly half of the inhabited world. The extreme slowness of contemporary colonial empire formation—conquests, territorial occupation, and population control typically took more than two centuries in Asia and Africa—contrasted sharply with their rapid collapse after World War II. In less than twenty years, nearly a hundred colonies in Asia and Africa gained independence through decolonization, giving birth to what was then called the Third World.
Swiss participation in colonial enterprises
Military involvement Swiss participation in European colonial expansion took various forms, beginning in the early 17th century with Swiss mercenaries participating in colonial conquests and colonial order maintenance operations. In the New World, Swiss military personnel engaged in the conquest of North America. In certain Dutch plantation colonies, they conducted campaigns against revolting slaves. A Swiss battalion participated in a French expedition from 1801–1803 to suppress Toussaint Louverture's insurrection in Saint-Domingue (Haiti), hoping to recapture the colony and restore slavery.
In Asia, the Dutch East India Company, which established numerous trading posts and strongholds in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), the East Indies (Indian archipelago), the Malay Peninsula (Malaysia), and the coasts of the Indian subcontinent (India), recruited Swiss soldiers. The company went so far as to enroll an entire Swiss regiment, that of the Neuchâtel brothers Charles-Daniel and Pierre-Frédéric de Meuron. Swiss mercenaries also entered the service of the British East India Company and fought against the French for control of portions of the subcontinent.
In Africa, Swiss soldiers first appeared in South Africa, then in Morocco and Egypt, as well as in Algeria during the French conquest. During the 1880s, about twenty Swiss officers served in the army of Leopold II, King of the Belgians, self-proclaimed absolute sovereign of the Congo. Among them was Erwin Federspiel, who upon returning to Switzerland defended in a pamphlet (Wie es im Congostaat zugeht. Skizzen, 1909) the brutal and predatory exploitation system established by the Belgian monarch.
Commercial and financial involvement Swiss business circles participated in the Atlantic slave trade and colonial commerce despite the rarity and dispersion of sources documenting these activities. During much of the 18th and first third of the 19th centuries, Swiss individuals, mostly gravitating in Huguenot business circles (Protestant refugees), participated in the Atlantic slave trade. They comprised three groups: Swiss manufacturers and merchants supplying trade goods, chiefly printed cotton fabrics (indiennes) traded for Black captives on the West African coast; Swiss-born cotton printers who relocated to ports such as Nantes, France's principal slave port, to produce those goods locally; and Swiss financiers who backed slaving voyages among other ventures.
The most important companies were based in Basel (Christoph Burckhardt & Cie; Emmanuel and Nicolas Weis and sons; Riedy & Thurninger; Kuster & Pelloutier; Simon & Roques), Neuchâtel (Favre-Petitpierre & Cie; Pourtalès et Cie; Gorgerat Frères & Cie), and Geneva (Labat Frères, Rivier & Cie, Jean-Louis Baux & Cie). Some covered all activities conducted within triangular trade: production and sale of trade goods with cotton prints, participation in slave trafficking, and commercialization of colonial products (sugar, coffee, cocoa). Others traded raw materials essential for cotton print manufacturing: exotic American dyes (indigo, cochineal, dyewood), gum arabic from Senegal, and white cotton fabrics from India that constituted the base product for printing.
Banking and investment Financial involvement in the Atlantic slave trade occurred in a less dispersed manner. Established in Lisbon, the Neuchâtel native David de Pury was a shareholder in a Portuguese chartered company holding a state concession granting commercial monopoly, one of whose activities was the slave trade, deporting captives from Angolan coasts to Brazilian plantations. Similarly, banks invested money in the slave trade. The establishments Marcuard & Cie and Zeerleder & Cie of Bern appear on the shareholder list of the French East India Company, which launched more than 130 expeditions from the Atlantic coast. Tourton & Baur and Mallet frères & Cie, two major Parisian banks with Genevan connections, possessed numerous clients in Rouen, Le Havre, Bordeaux, and Nantes, among whom were prominently French businessmen heavily engaged in slave trade and colonial commerce.
The cities of Bern and Zurich acquired shares in the South Sea Company, based in London, which organized slave sales to Spanish American colonies. Swiss private and institutional investors bought bonds issued by the Danish government, serving partly to relaunch the plantation slave economy on Saint Thomas island in the Danish West Indies.
Plantation ownership and colonial settlements Swiss insertion into the Atlantic slave trade often went hand in hand with involvement in colonial circuits. Their presence in the American plantation slave system illustrates this concomitance. In the 18th and 19th centuries, residents of Geneva, Basel, St. Gallen, Vaud, and Zurich owned plantations in Spanish, English, French, and Dutch colonies, as well as in Brazil. They were sometimes the operators (Friedrich Ludwig Escher in Cuba, for example), having slaves cultivate sugar, coffee, cocoa, cotton, or rice. More often they remained in Europe and delegated administration of their affairs to managers established on site. For them, plantations constituted important capital investments.
In Asia and colonial Africa, three emblematic cases of contemporary implantation deserve mention. The first involved the import-export company Volkart Brothers (Gebrüder Volkart), founded in Winterthur and Bombay, which became one of the largest exporters of Indian cotton. It succeeded in an extremely competitive branch and region by patiently building trust relationships with local business networks. The second occurred in French Algeria, where the Geneva Company of Swiss Colonies of Sétif, founded by capitalists from Calvin's city, represented one of the rare Swiss experiences in settlement and agricultural colonization. The third was located in British Gold Coast (Ghana). There, Basel capital supported the development of a Swiss commercial giant in sub-Saharan Africa—the Missions-Handlungs-Gesellschaft (MHG, Basel Trading Company)—atypically connected to the Basel Mission. This last case had another singularity: the MHG chose to specialize in cacao production and trade, making Ghana the world's largest supplier.
Scale and significance Measuring Swiss involvement in European expansionism reveals relatively limited engagement compared to major colonial powers. Switzerland's participation in Europe's overseas expansion was slight compared to Great Britain, a major colonial power whose long-lived empire spanned all continents, took every form, and generated intense circulation of people, goods, and capital. At the 18th-century height of the transatlantic slave trade, Britain carried 40% of the six million Africans shipped to the Americas, while Switzerland handled just over 2%.
Swiss relations with overseas territories were largely indirect and occasional. For the Atlantic slave trade example, Swiss participants were ultimately circumstantial slave traders, and this type of business represented only a reduced or marginal fraction of their economic activities. Their participation in the Atlantic slave trade was late and brief: it began two and a half centuries after the first expedition to the Americas and lasted only half a century. The second half of the 18th century, when Swiss actively engaged in the trade, was marked by intensification of the "shameful traffic," synonymous with immobilization of important capital and strong competition, and by increased risks inherent to the trade.
Cultural impact of colonialism in Switzerland
Civilizing discourse and racial theories The diffusion of the concept of "civilization," a true system of thought in the 19th century, constitutes one of the most visible traces of colonialism in Europe. In Switzerland, civilizing rhetoric hardly differed from that of European colonial empires. Considering Christianity as the sole source of salvation, free trade as a vector of material progress, and Western knowledge as objective truth, this concept justified colonial expansionism by rationalizing its characteristic violence and presenting it as a philanthropic act. This discourse, which conveyed contemporary racial theories, allowed overcoming fundamental contradictions, notably those opposing science and religion in Europe.
Until the first half of the 20th century, numerous Swiss journals and learned societies legitimized the colonial enterprise by emphasizing the concept of "civilization." In geographic studies, missionaries and explorers such as Paul Berthoud, Alfred Bertrand, Fritz Ramseyer, and Henri-Alexandre Junod defended colonialism's civilizing work, especially in Africa. Naturalists such as Paul and Fritz Sarasin (Southern Asia) and anthropologists like Rudolf Martin (Malaysia) and Eugène Pittard (Balkans) contributed to elaborating the racial "sciences" underlying civilizing discourse. The same applied to university research, as evidenced by the careers and works of Louis Agassiz, Auguste Forel, and Carl Vogt. In physician George Montandon, a sympathizer of the Nazi German regime, one observes the excesses of European racism qualified as scientific (eugenics, antisemitism).
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