Epilogue

Abstract

Why Switzerland? Historians in any country can respond to now-burgeoning scholarly literatures on global mobility and migration in world history, whether or not these themes have held a central place in their national historiographies. It is appropriate that historians of Switzerland now do so, too. Although seemingly isolated in its mountain fastness, Switzerland has long been connected to the wider world through its emigrants—some of them settler colonizers of far-off empires, its merchants, and its historically long and extensive dependence on foreign labour. Switzerland has developed its own terminologies of mobility to distinguish foreigners from natives, and these terminologies have over time responded to the dynamics of colonialism and to the great wealth generated in Switzerland, especially during the most recent era of globalization. One cannot understand the unique history of Swiss citizenship and forms of governance without attending carefully to mobility.