Harold Innis was a trailblazer in analyzing and interpreting Canada’s distinctive economic history. His masterly studies of the historic Canadian fur trade as well as of Canada’s cod fishing industry brought him international recognition as an eminent scholar. But he also researched and wrote brilliantly about railways, the forestry and mining industries, and many other themes in Canada’s economic growth. In later years, foreshadowing media gurus such as Marshall McLuhan, a university colleague, he crowned a brilliant academic career with innovative inquiries of world scope into communications media and communications theory. Thus, this outstanding economist who taught for over thirty years at the University of Toronto made signal contributions to world learning.
 

To research his first major work, The Fur Trade in Canada, Harold Innis extensively travelled Canada's fur trading routes.  His investigations led him to Churchill, Manitoba, in 1929, the year before his important tome was published.  At this time, he explored by canoe the Churchill River watershed of northern Manitoba. [Photo, courtesy University of Toronto Library]

Born near Otterville in southwestern Ontario in 1894 and educated at McMaster and the University of Toronto, Innis served overseas in World War I. Wounded and invalided home in 1917, he pursued his economic studies at the University of Chicago until, in 1920, he became a lecturer in Toronto’s political economy department. His doctoral thesis, published in 1923 as A History of the Canadian Pacific Railway, demonstrates that Innis recognized the relationship between the forces that engineered this transcontinental rail line and Canada’s own natural and historic lines of water communications.

At the same time, he was looking for an all-Canadian formula, not those of American or British-trained colleagues, to apply to his country’s economic development. Accordingly, his first classic work, The Fur Trade in Canada (1930) – aptly subtitled An Introduction to Canadian Economic History – opposed the “continentalist” American approach to Canada’s past experience by asserting that the country’s political borders were really those marked out by its primary staple fur trade (rooted as it was on the St. Lawrence-Great Lakes system) that had expanded to continental limits long before the Americans spanned the continent themselves.
 

A brilliant economic historian respected internationally, Harold Adams Innis, who spent nearly 32 years as a University of Toronto faculty member, later turned his attention to understanding the important role emerging communications technology would have in the development of a post-war economy. Considered today a trailblazer for the likes of Marshall McLuhan, Innis pioneered studies in both Canada’s Fur Trade and Cod Fishery. [Photo, courtesy Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto]

Taking much of a decade to produce, this major study first introduced his “staple thesis” of economic development. Ten years later, his next large study, just as impressive, was called The Cod Fisheries: The History of an International Economy. Here Innis reinforced his “staples approach” to Canada’s even earlier basic staple trade. Yet he dealt not only with the fisheries’ Canadian context but also with their European links and communications that certainly reached far beyond continental bounds. And that study led even more widely to his last pioneering studies. Published in the early fifties, Empire and Communications (1950), The Bias of Communications (1951), and Changing Concepts of Time (1952) opened wide the way to global examinations of mass media and their effects on human history, economy, and society. Though Innis died in 1952, at just 59, his impact by then – and since – could well be termed monumental. In fact, one could argue that this trilogy created the essential foundations for exploring how the media generates and controls public opinion.

Innis, of Loyalist descent, produced many other valuable works whether teaching, researching, or sitting on Royal Commissions of inquiry. These works, for instance, included Peter Pond, Fur Trader and Adventurer (1930), Problems of Staple Production in Canada (1933), Settlement and the Mining Frontier (1936), and Political Economy in the Modern State (1946). His writing style, often involved or difficult, was packed with solid information. In person he could at times seem distant, yet he was eager to talk with those who cared seriously, and, at times, was warm and witty. His close students and friends could testify to that – that it was a privilege to know and admire this influential Canadian scholar.

J.M.S. Careless