William Roger Louis - Education

Education

Louis entered the University of Oklahoma in 1954 as a Letters Major, an honors program that required one ancient and two modern languages, and combined English, history, and philosophy—the equivalent of a liberal arts education. Louis spent his second year of college in Frieburg and Paris, where he roomed with Hans-Peter Schwartz, today known as one of Germany's leading political scientists and the biographer of Adenauer, and where he befriended Nancy Maginnes, the future wife of Henry Kissinger. Louis's time abroad kindled an interest in African and Middle Eastern nationalism. He spent the summer of 1956 in Egypt and was in Cairo when Gamel Abdel Nasser made his speech nationalizing the Suez Canal. The speech was made from Alexandria, but speakers were wired throughout Cairo, and Louis's Egyptian friends kept him informed of the happenings. Louis spent his last two years of college at the University of Oklahoma, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa.

With the help of OU's Philip Nolan, Louis applied for a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, and was admitted to Harvard in 1959. "This was a heady experience," Louis later wrote. He took courses with Stanley Hoffman on France, Merle Fainsod and Adam Ulam on Russia, Franklin Ford on Germany, and David Owen on England. The "best of Harvard education," however, were the classes with Rupert Emerson, who taught nationalism in colonial Africa, and Barrington Moore, who provided introduction to Marx and Marxist analysis -- "an approach so radically different from all others that it was a revelation," Louis later wrote. Above all, Louis benefited from Ernest May, who he regards as having "one of the most fertile and inventive minds of all historians I have known."

After one year at Harvard, Louis decided to transfer to St. Antony's College, University of Oxford. The decision was influenced by Arthur Smithies, the great Australian economist, who told Louis: "If you are really interested in studying Nasser and Africa and all that rot, then you had better go somewhere where they know something about it, which definitely is not Harvard.". Smithies helped Louis get a Marshall Scholarship to Oxford, and he began studies in 1960. Louis studied under the historians Margery Perham, John Andrew Gallagher and A.J.P. Taylor, the last of which Louis describes as a "galvanizing experience." Taylor was "not only the towering radical historian of our time, but also one of the great writers of the English language." Louis's time at Oxford centered on the imperial history seminar headed by Vincent Harlow and later by John Gallagher, at which time imperial history had been reinvigorated by the "Robinson and Gallagher" thesis of informal imperialism that later became the subject of one of Louis's edited books. Louis's doctoral thesis began as a comparative study of German, British, and Belgian coloinal administration in central Africa, and later was narrowed to the study published as Ruanda-Urundi.