Herman van der Wee#

Biography

Herman Van der Wee is Professor emeritus of Social and Economic History at Leuven University (Belgium). He was a student at Leuven University, at the Sorbonne and the Law Faculty in Paris, at London University and the London School of Economics. He was a Research Fellow at several Institutes of Advanced Study in Europe, the United States, Asia and Australia, and lectured at universities worldwide. He is an Honorary President of the International Economic History Association and a member of several Academies of Sciences (Belgium, The Netherlands, Great Britain, and the United States).

He published widely on the European Economy of the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Period (i.a. The Growth of the Antwerp Market and the European Economy, fourteenth-sixteenth centuries, 1963, 3 volumes; The Low Countries in the Early Modern World (1993), on Contemporary Economic History (i.a. Prosperity and Upheaval: the World Economy, 1945-1980, 1983; also published in several other languages), on Banking History (i.a. A History of European Banking; also published in several other languages), on Monetary and Financial History (i.a. A Small Nation in the Turmoil of the Second World War. Money, Finance and Occupation: Belgium, its Enemies, its Friends, 1939-1945).

He was honored with several Prizes: the Five Yearly Prize for the Historical Sciences by the Belgian Academy of Sciences; the Five Yearly Solvay Prize for the Humanities by the Belgian National Foundation of Scientific Research; the Heineken Prize for the Historical Sciences by the Netherlands Academy of Sciences.