William Roger Louis - Career

Career

After Oxford, Louis went to Yale to teach courses on comparative imperialism, where there existed a strong tradition of research in German colonialism. Yale also marked the beginning of his long and successful career of collaborating on edited volumes, among them (with Prosser Gifford) a series on British and German colonialism in Africa and another on A.J.P. Taylor's view on the origins of the Second World War. "At conference after conference," writes Ronald Robinson, "the circle of Louis' consultants widened with the number of contributors. He made his first major contribution to Imperial history as the grand impresario of symposia.". In 1970 Louis moved to the University of Texas at Austin where he took positions as the Kerr Chair in English History and Culture and Director of the British Studies seminar at the "Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center. His ascension to a full professorship allowed for a flurry of publications, both individual and edited, which laid the foundations for Louis's reputation as one of the foremost imperial historians of his generation.

Louis's early achievements as a historian gave him a wide reputation in his field that was commemorated in an issue of the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, and particularly in an article by Ronald Robinson, entitled "Roger Louis and the Official Mind of Decolonization." One of Louis's notable early accomplishments was his success in producing a series of edited volumes on a wide range of themes. Louis held the unique position of being primarily a historian of British policy, but also an American, an expert on the Middle East, and a proponent of "area studies," a field whose rise to prominence paralleled Louis's own career. His own scholarly interests span these themes. The result of his collaboration on such a wide range of issues was to bring together a diverse cast of historians whose interests spanned the sub-disciplines of history. The wide range of contacts he developed and his skills as an editor would later serve him well in his role as the editor-in-chief of the Oxford History of the British Empire. Perhaps the most enduring of Louis's edited volumes is The Robinson and Gallagher Controversy (1976), a short volume which brought together the main lines of debate over the contributions of John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson to the history of the British Empire. Their scholarly oeuvre was at the time, and still remains today, one of the most important theories to have been made about the causes and nature of British imperial expansion Louis's introductory essay itself proposed something of a consensus that found wide acceptance among other historians.

A second major contribution made by Louis was to offer a large number of original basic narratives of the post-war Empire, particularly on the Middle East. His publications, both in article and book form, discussed the era from 1940 to 1967, most in the context of the Cold War and the rise of American power. His first major book, Imperialism at Bay, 1941-1945, tells the story of the contest between British and American officials over the fate of empire in the post-war world. Louis's second and most famous book, The British Empire in the Middle East, 1945-1951, traces the six critical years of Attlee's Labour Government after the war, during which time the British were able to uphold their informal influence in the Middle East with the backing of the United States government, which shifted towards support of the British Empire to create a bulwark against communist advance. These two books contain themes that later became the subject of full-length books edited by Louis. One, with Robert Stookey, covered the Zionist take-over in Palestine under Truman's sponsorship in 1948; another, with James Bill, revisited Musaddiq's nationalization of Iranian oil in 1951; yet another, with Robert Fernea, studied the Iraqi revolution of 1958. More could be added. The general thrust of these contributions was to provide historians with some of the earliest histories of post-war British imperialism, written from the perspective of the "official mind."

The final contribution made by Louis involves what Ronald Robinson called "a symposia to end all symposia." The Oxford History of the British Empire, published initially in five volumes, brought together over six scores of historians in covering four centuries of British imperialism. Multiple reviewers in top academic journals have lauded the series as one of the great achievements of the age. One reviewer, the historian D.A. Low, wrote that, "all in all, these five volumes constitute an extraordinary achievement which has brought Roger Louis's dauntingly formidable editorial skills to their apogee... He has brought the whole enterprise to a conclusion all in one go and in an astonishingly short period of time. Those of us who have organized similar (if very much more modest) ventures can only mop our brows in amazement." The project was funded by the Rhodes Trust and the National Endowment for the Humanities in Washington, D.C. Louis served as Editor-in-Chief of the series, co-editor of the twentieth century volume (with Judith Brown), and author of a historiographic introduction to the fifth volume entitled "Historiography." One critic, the British historian Max Beloff, expressed skepticism publicly when a presumably anti-colonial and "politically correct" American from Texas emerged as the editor-in-chief, but these criticisms were later withdrawn when it became evident that Louis had carried through the series with his usual degree of impartiality.

In all of his work, Louis's style has remained unapologetically empirical with rigorous fidelity to evidence. He prefers the "art of the historian" to the social science approach - the pen portraits that capture fascinating characters, the panorama of official perceptions and misconceptions, narrative over theoretical arguments, and clear, precise writing.