Accounts of Swiss global history have recently pointed to the Swiss cantons as a hinterland for military recruitment for Dutch, French and British colonial mercenaries. Following the biographies of a group of young ministers who had left their Swiss home to take up a post in colonial Britain, this paper argues that the Swiss cantons not only served as a pool of military labour, but also as an “information hinterland” for young Swiss academics who were recruited into imperial institutions. Between the Revolution of 1688–1689 and the Seven Years’ War, these career migrants took up posts as secretaries, librarians, chaplains, translators and agents. Their information work for British missionary societies, the Church of England, the colonial collections of London and the British East India Company was supported by three historical developments: the Protestant International, the growing importance of colonial London as a metropole of collecting and the need of the Company to recruit Protestant mercenaries during the Carnatic Wars in India. Swiss information labour led to a multiplication of the information channels of the British Empire. Even if these young men worked under precarious conditions, their interweaving of private and institutional correspondences made them into ambiguous auxiliaries of empire.