Outsourcing refers to getting things done from out-house instead of getting them done in-house. History of outsourcing is as old as the history of mankind. Since the individual started to form groups, small communities, and societies, the outsourcing began. To overcome lack of knowledge, skills, and efforts pressurized to go in for specialization, and specialization led to division of labor.

The other pressure point in the history of outsourcing has been the keen desire of rich nations, its organizations to exploit the opportunity to get the work done out-house at a rate lesser than the in-house rate. And of late offshore outsourcing has provided further opportunity to productivity gains by outsourcing activities to economically less developed countries. As such the outsourcing history has been created because of the keen desire to benefit by the developed world.

The history of outsourcing can be traced to different periods and different sectors. The first wave of outsourcing history started during the industrial revolution, when many of the services were outsourced, but within the countryside.

The second wave in the history of outsourcing began with the outsourcing of manufacturing low-tech items, e.g., The Indian textile manufacturing industry outsourced to British textile mills. The third wave in the history of outsourcing started with outsourcing of manufacturing high-tech items like computers and electronic items.

Today, there is hardly any activity which can not be outsourced. The list of outsourcing includes manufacturing, services, R&D, clinical trials, security and monitoring, giving tuitions, and what not.

According to Forrester Research, by 2015 3.3 million jobs and $ 136 billion in wages will move to India, China, Russia, Pakistan, Vietnam, et al. A look at China's place as a source of outsourcing reveals that it is at the top in manufacturing. This is so because of the cheap labor, scale of economies, and the currency rate differential. Because of it the US has a very large trade deficit with China.

India has excelled in providing different kind of services, such as call centers, IT business solutions, accounting services, medical and legal transcriptions, payroll processing, insurance claim processing, data entry and word processing, online tuitions, etc. Recently one US Company has outsourced monitoring of its workplace through cameras to a small Indian company.

The history of outsourcing has recently got a big fillip because of globalization wave and commitment of all the nations of the world. Now all the nations are competing with each other to increase their share in the world economy. Despite resistance from the developed world labor unions due to displacement of labor and the politicians of the developing world due to erosion of their vote bank, outsourcing activities are bound to crate new history.