From the early 1600s onwards, the increasing demand for labour of the European colonial powers, particularly the Netherlands and England, created new opportunities for people in search of work across Europe. My project focuses on the thousands of work migrants who came to the Netherlands every year in order to join the Dutch East India Company (VOC) as soldiers, sailors or craftsmen. It analyses the social background of these migrants, their previous mobile experiences, their relation to each other, the transfer of knowledge about job perspectives from a regional to a global sphere, and the impact of outmigration on the regions of origin. For this purpose, data from the VOC muster rolls as well as other sources from the Dutch National Archive will be combined with archival research in selected regions in the German speaking lands.

The goal of this project is to study the interplay and entanglement between local, regional and global migrations. It observes the "multipolar geographical mobility" (Craig Koslofsky/Roberto Zaugg) of people in search of work, who changed direction time and again, influenced by new information or people met on the way. Departing from their locality, most people first moved within their region and followed established patterns before some of them grasped an opportunity to move beyond. By linking analysis on a micro and meso level to phenomena on a macro level, this project thus also aims to contribute to current methodological discussions in global history and migration studies.