Henk Wesseling

Henk Wesseling (6 August 1937 – 18 August 2018) was a Dutch historian. He was a professor of contemporary history at Leiden University, former rector of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study between 1995 and 2002. In 1974, shortly after he was appointed to the chair of European history, Wesseling founded the "Center for the History of European Expansion and Reaction" within the Leiden University history department. It included specialists in China and India, as well as Indonesia, and funding was found to hire young specialists in Atlantic and African and other topics. Colonial history had been defunct for nearly two decades, but Wesseling insisted on its importance in Dutch and European history, although some colleagues remain dubious. The department was custodian of hundreds of kilometers of shelf space devoted to primary sources that were exploited by advanced students. An annual workshop brought in leading scholars and a new specialized journal "Itinerario" was launched. Wesseling published widely-read studies on imperialism, the partition of Africa, French military, intellectual, and cultural history, and a biography of Charles De Gaulle. As an academic manager, he collaborated in establishing and funding numerous projects such as the European summer schools, an international project for the comparative study of India and Indonesia, and the Transfer of Science and Technology Program.
In 1988 he became member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.