His parents, Henry Edward Louis and Bena May Flood, were "solidly middle class people who set a strong example of the importance of work, thrift, and family".
[2] Louis admits that he is "less religious", but he describes his philosophy in life with the one-liner made famous by Franklin Roosevelt: "I am a Christian and a Democrat.
Louis entered OU in 1954 as a Letters major, an honors curriculum that included one ancient and two modern languages, English, history, and philosophy.
He spent his second year of college in Freiburg and Paris, where he roomed with Hans-Peter Schwartz, a biographer of Konrad Adenauer, and befriended Nancy Maginnes, the future wife of Henry Kissinger.
[1]: 291 The "best of [his] Harvard education" were the classes with Rupert Emerson, who taught nationalism in colonial Africa, and Barrington Moore, Jr., who provided an introduction to Karl Marx and Marxist analysis.
"[1]: 292 After completing his education, Louis taught courses for eight years at Yale University on comparative imperialism, where there already existed a strong tradition of research on German colonialism.
[3]: 1–12 In 1970, Louis joined the history faculty of the University of Texas at Austin (UT) and became the director of the British Studies Seminar at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center.
[citation needed] Louis has written a large number of books and articles about the British Empire from 1940 to 1967, particularly concerning the Middle East,[3]: 5 the Cold War, and the rise of American imperialism in the region.
His first major book, Imperialism at Bay, 1941–1945 (1977), covers the contest between British and American officials over the fate of Britain's empire in the postwar world.
One reviewer, the historian Anthony Low, wrote, "All in all, these five volumes constitute an extraordinary achievement which has brought Roger Louis's dauntingly formidable editorial skills to their apogee...
[11] Louis's early achievements as an historian were commemorated by Ronald Robinson in the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History in a 1999 article entitled "Wm.
Louis included a handful of Oxford historians, each of which were among the most prominent and influential scholars of their generation: A. J. P. Taylor, Margery Perham, Ronald Robinson, John Andrew Gallagher, and Max Beloff.
Other influences included Barrington Moore, Jr., Ernest R. May, and Arthur Smithies - all of Harvard - and Vincent Harlow, Roger Owen, Christopher Platt, Sarvepalli Gopal, and Albert Hourani, all of Oxford.
In the preface to his book The British Empire in the Middle East, 1945–1951, Louis stated, "My views on Arab nationalism and Zionism, and on the United States and the Middle East, have been influenced by the sensitive and dead-on-the-mark observations of J. C. Hurewitz.”[13] Please note that a number of the following titles refer to recently revised versions of these articles as published in Louis's volume of collected essays: Ends of British Imperialism