UWP would like to extend their condolences to the family and friends of Robin Okey on their recent loss.
Robin Okey was born in Cardiff during the Second World War. He received his higher education at Oxford University before lecturing in modern history at Warwick University for over forty years. He was an Emeritus Professor with the university after retiring in 2007. He published a number of important volumes on the history of central and eastern Europe in the modern period, including Eastern Europe 1740-1980. Feudalism to Communism (1982), and Taming Balkan Nationalism. The Habsburg ’Civilizing Mission’ in Bosnia, 1878-1914 (2007). He also researched various aspects of Welsh history for many decades, publishing pioneering articles in journals such as Y Traethodydd and Planet. John Davies descried him in his masterpiece The History of Wales (1990) as the ‘most exciting of our historians’. His last book, Towards Modern Nationhood:Wales and Slovenia, c. 1750-1918, was published by University of Wales Press in November this year, the culmination of his research over many years comparing Wales’s modern historical development with that of other small nations in Europe. The book has been highly praised by other historians, such as Dr Simon Brooks who described it as: ‘An astonishing book that argues, despite much noise to the contrary, that Wales was, is and will be a nation. However, the way it became a nation differed from the continental European model, and by comparing Wales with Slovenia, Robin Okey shows that while nationalism is a singular noun it is indeed a plural experience’.