With his 1999 death "disappears the last great figure in the generation that presided over the vast expansion of the Latin American scholarly field in the United States during the years following World War II.
"[1] With colleagues at University of California, Berkeley who came to be known as the "Berkeley School" of Latin American history, Borah pursued projects to gather data from archives on indigenous populations, colonial enterprises, and "land-life" relations that revolutionized the study of Latin American history.
He did not know how his parents and extended family came to be in Mississippi, but they moved to New York when Borah was young, then relocated to Los Angeles when he was an adolescent.
He spoke openly about the discrimination he encountered early in his career, advised by his mentor Bolton that he was unlikely to find an academic job because he was a Jew.
Borah was not interested in political history, and his Berkeley doctoral committee suggested that he pursue a dissertation on silk-raising in colonial Mexico, which he completed in 1940 and published in 1943.
They attributed the dramatic collapse in the Indian population to excessive hard labor imposed by the Spanish and the disruption of traditional society, as well as new European diseases.
[11] Borah also published important studies on economic history, including New Spain's Century of Depression, positing a downturn in the economy due to the decimation of the indigenous populations.
He "wielded a scathing and even eviscerating verbal style that might unnerve all but the most confident graduate student or thick-skinned colleague" but he also had a "fundamental, if often concealed, kindness.