Hugh Borton

Who was Hugh Borton?

Hugh Borton was an American historian who specialized in the history of Japan, later serving as president of Haverford College.

Borton was born on May 14, 1903, to a devout Quaker household in Moorestown Township, New Jersey. His parents sent him to Quaker schools and after graduating from Haverford College in 1927, he and his wife Elizabeth Wilbur, proceeded to find a way of making a living that was in line with their Quaker beliefs. They looked to the American Friends Service Committee, which set up teaching posts for them at a small school in the foothills of the Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains. In 1928 Borton and his wife were asked to travel to Tokyo, Japan, to help the Committee's work there.

Borton's three years living among the Japanese affected his outlook to the extent that he thereafter devoted himself to studying Japan. Initially, Borton sought guidance from Sir George Sansom, a British scholar who was then serving in the British Consulate. In 1931, Borton returned to America to further his education. He completed a Master's degree in history at Columbia University and studied briefly at Harvard University. He then traveled across the Atlantic to pursue further study under the supervision of Professors J. J. L. Duyvendak and Johannes Rahder at Leiden University in the Netherlands. He was awarded his PhD by Leiden after several years of work at Tokyo Imperial University. He returned to the United States to take a position on the faculty at Columbia, lecturing on modern Japanese history and language. He also played a key role in structuring the first undergraduate program in Japanese studies in the newly expanded Department of Chinese and Japanese. His research publications prior to the Second World War included Peasant Uprisings in Japan of the Tokugawa Period and Japan Since 1931: Its Political and Social Development.