Woodrow W. Borah (1912-1999)

Woodrow Wilson Borah, born into a family of Jewish merchants in the back country of Mississippi in 1912, became, during a long career at Berkeley, one of the world's foremost scholars of colonial Mexico. Borah began his scholarly life when only a mere handful of people, primarily at Harvard and Berkeley, were devoted to the study of Latin American history. He contributed mightily to its rapid development during the years following World War II, keeping abreast of the various changes in academic fashion. He died in December 1999.

Woodrow Borah was best known for his innovative research on the historical demography of colonial Mexico. In the early 1950s he formed an unusual academic friendship with Sherburne Cook, a Berkeley colleague in physiology. Together, they wrote 22 articles and books. This work, assiduously drawn from colonial records, established the process and full dimensions of the demographic catastrophe that befell the native population in the wake of the European conquest, and left an enduring contribution not only to Mexican but to World History as well.

Had l'ecole Berkeley, as the French called it, stuck to the relatively solid ground of archival research, their work would undoubtedly have been widely regarded as both original and fundamental. What has provoked most critical attention to it was their statistical projection of the demographic curve backward to suggest truly spectacular population figures at the time of European contact. These estimates, ranging as high as 25 million people and more for central Mexico alone, made their way into polemical tracts and popular texts, but have come in for keen criticism by specialists in the field. Whatever the final resolution of this debate, Borah and Cook's monumental work provided the point of departure for serious demographic history in the Americas and the standard against which present research is measured.

The commanding importance of the work on population led to a certain public and scholarly perception of Borah as an exclusively demographic historian. This focus drew attention away from his original research on a wide range of other subjects in colonial history. Three important monographs dealing with previously unexamined colonial trade and navigation, silk production, and price history, preceded the demographic work. In 1951 New Spain's Century of Depression provided a persuasively argued historical model, anticipating by several decades such later interpretive schemes as World Systems analysis. Nearly 40 other essays and articles followed, culminating in his magisterial Justice by Insurance (1983). Among these publications, to take a less-known example, is a chapter in Essays in Population History, vol. 3 (1979), dealing with the impact of the European conquest on Indian diet, still the best work on that little-studied subject. All of this work carried Borah's mark of archival research, tightly-knit argument and precise, chiseled prose. He continued to write, producing reviews and even a last monograph on Price Trends of Royal Tribute Commodities in Nueva Galicia (1992) for the Ibero-Americana series, right down to his final illness.

One can also detect in all of his work a deep respect for Mexico and its Hispanic culture and colonial institutions, which, I believe, grew out of his early field experience in the heady years of Lázaro Cárdenas. As a young man of 26, he explored the municipal, parish and cathedral records in several states; in effect, going wherever the rails and rattling trains might lead. Until then, few scholars anywhere poked their heads into provincial records. Many subsequent research trips enabled him to know the country as one can only by living in the entrails of the archives. In the course of long devotion to the country and its history, Borah gained the affectionate admiration of his many Latin American and European colleagues. In 1981-82, he was invited to occupy the Alfonso Caso Memorial Chair at the National University of Mexico, high honor for a forastero.

In Berkeley during the 1960s and 1970s, among students and colleagues, Borah acquired a certain mythic...