Sir William Laird Clowes FKC (1 February 1856 – 14 August 1905) was a British journalist and historian whose principal work was The Royal Navy, A History from the Earliest Times to 1900, a text that is still in print.

For the services rendered in his career, Clowes was knighted, awarded the gold medal of the United States Naval Institute and given a civil list pension.

In 1876 his first work, a poetic Egyptian love story named Meroë was published and in 1879 he left the law to become a journalist, training outside London but returning in 1882 with his new wife Ethel Mary Louise.

Clowes' articles appeared in The Times entitled Black America: a Study of the ex-Slave and his Master, and described the segregation then in place in the region, predicting that it could one day erupt in a civil war.

For his services to journalism and naval history, he was knighted in the 1902 Coronation Honours,[8] receiving the accolade from King Edward VII at Buckingham Palace on 24 October that year.