The introduction establishes the key aims and arguments of the book and provides an outline of the different chapters. It introduces the three key sites to which the book follows the expatriate to tell situated stories of the category’s history and politics, its making and remaking, contestation and lived experience: international human resource management literature, the Expatriate Archive Centre in The Hague, and Nairobi, Kenya. In following the expatriate, the book traces the category’s postcolonial history and presence from mid-twentieth-century political decolonisation to today’s politics of migration. The book shows the expatriate to be a malleable and mobile category, of shifting meaning and changing membership. It is also a contested category, as passionately embraced by some as it is rejected by others. Finally, it can be a surprising category, doing unexpected work, effective in ways that are not determined. Yet, throughout its meanderings and disputes, the expatriate proves consistently central to struggles over inequality, power and social justice.