Between the Revolution of 1688–1689 and the Seven Years’ War, a sizeable group of young ministers left their Swiss home to take up a post in Britain. They were encouraged by Protestant solidarity during the War of the Spanish Succession as well as the close-knit Anglo-Swiss confessional networks that were patronised by English clergymen and the new missionary societies of the early eighteenth century. At the same time, these career migrants were driven by economic necessity. A surplus of students at universities forced young graduates to search for a suitable post abroad, if they failed to secure a placement at home. They found work as chaplains, secretaries, librarians, translators or agents with noble patrons or in the Church of England. As information workers who often served under precarious labour conditions, these migrants are no leisurely travellers who enjoyed the grand tour. Rather, their moving biographies tell intimate stories of early globalisation, proto-capitalism, confessional labour migration and British colonialism.

This curated data edition provides a repertory of a selection of some 750 manuscript letters from British and Swiss archives and libraries which were written or received by Anglo-Swiss chaplains between 1691 and 1757. Digitisations of the letters will be added subsequently, which will enable a detailed study of the chaplains’ correspondences between Britain and the Old Swiss Confederacy. Applying a microhistorical lens to global history, the edition thus offers digital materials to researchers and students alike to explore a series of largely uncharted lives of transnational mobility originating in the Swiss cantons and their allied members. It highlights letters by Johann Caspar Wettstein (1695–1760) from Basel, Johann Conrad Werndly (1656–1726) and John Henry Ott (1693–1743) from Zurich and Johannes Christian Leonhardi (1655–1725) from the Grisons, while including letters of the successful theologian Jean-Frédéric Ostervald (1663–1747) from Neuchâtel, who acted as one of the main patrons of Anglo-Swiss networks of confessional exchange. By collecting the letters of these mobile lives, the edition hopes to encourage further research into Swiss-British relations, the history of labour migration, the history of Protestantism, cultural translation and British colonialism.

The edition has been generously funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). It forms part of the project SwissBritNet: Swiss-British Cultural Exchange and Knowledge Networks 1600–1780 .