A Tribute to Wm. Roger Louis

A memorial service for Wm. Roger Louis will be held on Wednesday, November 4, 2026, at 12:00 p.m. at Weed Corley Fish Funeral Homes and Cremation Services – North, located at 5416 Parkcrest Drive, Austin, TX 78731. Wm. Roger Louis was a colossal figure in the study of the British Empire, especially in the study of later British imperialism in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. The British journalist and author Geoffrey Wheatcroft went so far as to compare Professor Louis’ study of the British Empire with Edward Gibbon’s canonical work on the Roman Empire.“If Gibbon has a successor,” Wheatcroft said, “it must be Wm. Roger Louis, who has become after a lifetime’s study the greatest and truly incomparable historian of the decline and fall of the British Empire.” Only a small handful of scholars in the field in the past century could credibly be called his equal in energy, presence, or impact. Paul Kennedy, the Richardson Dilworth Professor Emeritus of History and Global Affairs at Yale, put it simply, “There was really nothing quite like him.” Roger was born in Detroit in 1936, but he grew up in Oklahoma in the 1930s and 1940s. He said in an interview withThe Historianin 2000 that he learned the “importance of work, thrift and family” from his parents. His parents made sure that he and his sister were well educated. “Neither of us ever doubted that we were going to college.” He enjoyed literature, devoured books from the local Carnegie library, and played the French horn. He also enjoyed handball, swimming, and gymnastics. He attended church where he had his “first lessons in public speaking” from a charismatic preacher. He later claimed that “Whenever people ask me about my philosophy of life, I repeat the words President Roosevelt once told a reporter: ‘I am a Christian and a Democrat. What more does one need in life?” He continued to use this line throughout his life. He developed a deep “commitment to civil rights” while he was working in various jobs at the YMCA and realized how segregated Oklahoma was. When Roger became president of Sigma Alpha Epsilon at the University of Oklahoma, he tried to pave the way for desegregation in the fraternity. The YMCA also gave Professor Louis his first opportunity to travel outside of Oklahoma. He “learned that there was much more to the world than he had seen in Oklahoma.” He spent time in Freiburg, Germany, and at the Sorbonne in Paris. He learned to speak French and German. He even hitchhiked through the eastern Mediterranean to keep seeing the world. He completed his BA at the University of Oklahoma and then went on to complete his MA at Harvard and his D.Phil. at Oxford, where he was supervised by AJP Taylor. He also worked with Margery Perham and John “Jack” Gallagher. Roger credited Professor Taylor, a renowned stylist, with having “immensely improved my writing.” Professor Taylor taught him to keep his paragraphs short and to limit his discursive footnotes. Professor Taylor also encouraged Roger to write while researching rather than separating these stages. Professor Louis finished his doctorate in two years and taught at Yale from 1962 through 1970 before moving as a full professor to the University of Texas at Austin, where he became the Kerr Chair in English History and Culture in 1985. Professor Louis was the author or editor of more than thirty books from 1963 through 2025. In fact, it is difficult to determine the precise number of his final scholarly contributions. By 2000, he had published “over fifty articles” and he soon stopped counting all his books and articles on his curriculum vitae. The last version of his CV from 2012 described his total as simply “some thirty books.” By 1967, Roger, who was then an associate professor at Yale, had already published two books. In 1966 alone, he published articles in three of the most prominent journals in his field:American Historical Review, English Historical Review and Journal of Modern History. Professor Louis was just 31 years old, but he had already established himself, Kennedy claims, “as the single most important scholar on the later time of the British Empire.” Roger never slowed down. He said that he “routinely” worked “ten-hour days most days of the week” and that his wife Dagmar “never let me forget that I spent most days at the PRO” [Public Record Office] in London during their honeymoon. He visited the archives in London every single summer for decades and scoured other archives around the world. Judith Coffin, his colleague in History for many years at the Forty Acres, said that in terms of “boundless energy,” Professor Louis was “in a league of his own.” David Leal, a professor in Government, says that Professor Louis usually broke up his long days of work with an hour-long stroll around the campus at lunch time. He continued to work after retirement. His last book—The End of the British Empire in the Middle East, 1952-1971—was published with Oxford University Press in June of 2025. It was the second part of a two-part project that he began more than four decades ago on the British Empire in the Middle East. John Darwin, an emeritus professor at Oxford, has described the second book as “a monument of historical scholarship” that offers clear proof of Professor Louis’ “astonishing mastery of the archival record.” One could argue that the most significant project in Professor Louis’ career was the five-volumeOxford History of the British Empire. He served as the editor-in-chief, shepherding the enormous project through to completion. The five volumes were published in 1998 and 1999. When I was a graduate student in the early 2000s, these volumes were required reading. It remains the definitive collection on the British Empire. Far from simply celebrating the British Empire, Professor Louis ensured that the volumes were intentionally inclusive and nuanced in perspective. In his interview inTheHistorianin 2000, Professor Louis noted that “several prominent British historians complained about an American being the editor-in-chief” of the project because they worried that “the work would be biased against the British.” Professor Louis wanted to ensure that these definitive volumes on the Empire included complicated and multifaceted perspectives. Professor Louis described his vision of this project as a “new history of the British Empire” with a “less ideological approach” that told that history “not just from the standpoint of the British, but from those who had been on the receiving end of British imperialism.” He also tried to ensure that the volumes were “less Anglocentric” than traditional histories of the Empire and that they included “the significance the British Empire has had for the Scots, Irish, and Welsh.” He intentionally recruited “junior as well as senior scholars.” It was a successful and generative endeavor. Professor Darwin observed that “The energy and determination with which he drove through the whole series from conception to publication have become legendary.” Queen Elizabeth II named him Commander of the British Empire in 1999 for his role as editor. A scholar who has produced as much as Professor Louis and spent as much time in the archives as he did could be expected to devote a little less time to his teaching. Somehow Professor Louis had the energy to be both a prolific researcher and an engaging teacher. He said he learned at Yale that “good teaching and writing go hand in hand” and his advice for younger historians was that “teaching and doing research complement each other” because “you can certainly learn from students in ways that benefit your research, while your historical research can emphatically help you to become a better teacher.” In fact, Professor Louis’ teaching record clearly shows that he was a remarkable educator for thousands of undergraduate and graduate students since he began in 1970 at the Forty Acres. For more than a half century at UT Austin, he taught students about the British Empire and