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.

最大的“跨国”雇主（avant la letter）是欧洲印度公司和殖民军队。十七世纪至二十世纪期间，他们从欧洲各地招募了数百万雇佣兵和士兵，其中大部分来自社会下层。从十九世纪开始，他们向这些人及其在欧洲和殖民地的合法和非法家庭提供某些福利国家服务。为了维持这些系统，殖民地国家依赖于与整个欧洲地方、区域和国家行政部门的合作。然而，欧洲暴力扩张的经济和福利国家层面迄今为止几乎没有被研究过。本文以荷兰殖民军为例，首次展示了有多少金钱从殖民地流向欧洲下层家庭。