Information about Harold Innis

Harold Adams Innis (November 5, 1894 – November 8, 1952) was a professor of political economy at the University of Toronto and the author of seminal works on Canadian economic history and on media and communication theory. Innis is considered by many to have been one of the finest and most original scholars Canada has ever produced. He helped develop the staples thesis which holds that Canada's culture and economy has been shaped by the exploitation and export of a series of staples such as fur, fish, wood, wheat, mined metals and fossil fuels. Innis's communications writings explore the role of media in shaping the culture and development of civilizations. He argued, for example, that a balance between oral and written forms of communication contributed to the flourishing of Greek civilization in the 5^th century BCE.


Innis laid the basis for scholarship that looked at the social sciences from a distinctly Canadian point of view. As the head of U of T's political economy department, he worked to build up a cadre of Canadian scholars so that universities would not continue to rely as heavily on British or American-trained professors unfamiliar with Canada's history and culture. He was successful in establishing sources of financing for Canadian scholarly research.


Innis also tried to defend universities from political and economic pressures. He believed that independent universities, as centres of critical thought, were essential to the survival of Western civilization. His intellectual disciple and university colleague, Marshall McLuhan, thought that Innis's premature death constituted a disastrous loss for human understanding. McLuhan wrote: "I am pleased to think of my own book The Gutenberg Galaxy as a footnote to the observations of Innis on the subject of the psychic and social consequences, first of writing then of printing."

Rural roots

Early life

Harold Adams Innis was born in 1894 on a small livestock and dairy farm near the community of Otterville in Southwestern Ontario's Oxford County. As a boy he loved the rhythms and routines of farm life and he never forgot his rural origins.^[1]

His mother, Mary Adams Innis had named him 'Herald', hoping he would become a minister in the strict evangelical Baptist faith that she and her husband William shared. At the time, the Baptist Church was an important part of life in rural areas. It gave isolated families a sense of community and embodied the values of individualism and independence. Its far-flung congregations were not ruled by a centralized, bureaucratic authority.^[2] Innis became an agnostic in later life, but never lost his interest in religion.^[3]



According to his friend and biographer Donald Creighton, Innis's character was molded by the Church: "The strict sense of values and the feeling of devotion to a cause, which became so characteristic of him in later life, were derived, in part at least, from the instruction imparted so zealously and unquestioningly inside the severely unadorned walls of the Baptist Church at Otterville." Creighton added that Innis's Baptist upbringing instilled "a great impatience with organizations, hierarchies, dignities, and rules."^[4]

Early education

Innis's parents noticed his intellectual gifts and encouraged him to get an education. He attended the one-room schoolhouse in Otterville and the community's high school, but had to travel by train to Woodstock, Ontario 20 miles distant to complete his secondary education at a Baptist-run collegiate institute. His biographer, Alexander John Watson notes that the return train fare was 10 cents or about $2 in 2007 Canadian currency, a significant investment for a farm family.^[5]

It was an exhausting life. Every school day from September 1908 to June 1912, Harold walked two miles to the railway station in Otterville, took the 7 a.m. train to Woodstock, and walked a mile to the institute. The itinerary was repeated in reverse in the late afternoon...Who can imagine a teenager in our time walking four thousand plus miles and taking well over one thousand train trips to obtain a secondary school education?

Watson adds that Innis rode in the train's smoking car so that he could talk with the 'characters' there.

Throughout his life, he took great delight in stories. In being daring enough to ride to school with the 'characters', Innis established his habit of gleaning whatever information he could from people he met in the course of his travels. His later emphasis on the importance of the oral tradition was one way of recognizing the significance of the smoking-car milieu to his understanding of the world.^[6]

Innis intended to become a public-school teacher. He passed the entrance examinations for teacher training, but decided to take a year off to earn the money he would need to support himself at one of Ontario's teachers colleges. At age 18 therefore, he returned to the one-room schoolhouse at Otterville to teach for one term until the local school board could recruit a fully-qualified teacher. The experience made him realize that the life of a teacher in a small country school was not for him. A wider world beckoned.^[7]

University studies

In October 1913, Innis started classes at McMaster University (then in Toronto). McMaster was a natural choice. It was a Baptist university and students from the Woodstock collegiate frequently went there. In spite of its religious affiliation, McMaster was far from a dogmatic or doctrinaire institution. Its liberal arts professors encouraged critical thinking and debate.^[8] Innis was especially influenced by James Ten Broeke, the university's one-man philosophy department. Ten Broeke posed an essay question that Innis pondered for the rest of his life: "Why do we attend to the things to which we attend?"^[9]

Before his final undergraduate year at McMaster, Innis spent a summer teaching at the Northern Star School in the tiny frontier farming community of Landonville near Vermillion, Alberta. The experience gave him a sense of the vastness of Canada. He also learned about Western grievances over high interest rates and steep transportation costs.^[10] In his final undergraduate year, Innis focused on history and economics. He kept in mind a remark made by history lecturer, W.S. Wallace that the economic interpretation of history was not the only possible one, but that it went the deepest.^[11]

War service

Upon graduation from McMaster, Innis enlisted in the Canadian army (because of his Christian principles) and was sent to France in the fall of 1916 to fight in the First World War.^[12] Trench warfare with its "mud and lice and rats" had a devastating effect on him.^[13]

Innis's role as an artillery signaller gave him firsthand experience of life (and death) on the front lines as he participated in the successful Canadian attack on Vimy Ridge.^[14] Signallers, or spotters, watched where each artillery shell landed, then sent back aiming corrections so that the next shells could hit their targets more accurately.

These spotters had to make their observations from forward positions, often in front of the first lines of trenches. On 7 July 1917 Innis was doing duty as a spotter under cover of darkness when his position was noted from an enemy observation balloon by flare light. The balloon called down German artillery fire and Innis received a serious shrapnel wound though his right thigh. He spent eight months in various military hospitals in England.^[15]

Innis's war was over. His biographer, John Watson notes his physical wound took seven years to heal, but the psychological damage lasted a lifetime. Innis suffered recurring bouts of depression and nervous exhaustion because of his military service. The Great War also influenced his intellectual outlook. It strengthened his Canadian nationalism; sharpened his understanding of the destructive effects of technology including the communications media that were used so effectively to "sell" the war and then conceal its futility; and led him, for the first time, to doubt his Baptist faith.^[16]

Graduate studies

The history of the CPR

After returning home, Innis completed an MA at McMaster, graduating in April 1918. His thesis, called The Returned Soldier "was a detailed description of the public policy measures that were necessary, not only to provide a supportive milieu to help veterans get over the effects of the war, but also to move on with national reconstruction."^[17] Innis continued his studies at the University of Chicago where he wrote his Ph.D thesis on the history of the Canadian Pacific Railway. The completion of Canada's first transcontinental railway in 1885 had been a defining moment in Canadian history. The building of the CPR has been celebrated in two bestselling books by Pierre Berton, The National Dream and The Last Spike as well as in Canadian Railroad Trilogy, a popular song by Gordon Lightfoot. Innis's thesis, eventually published as a book in 1923, can be seen as an early attempt to tell this story from an economic historian's point of view. It uses voluminous statistics to underpin its arguments. Innis maintains that the difficult and expensive construction project was sustained by fears of American annexation of the Canadian West.

The [thesis] also chronicles the government decisions involved in the CPR's history, the impact of the railway on outlying regions (especially with respect to wheat production and immigration on the prairies), and the profit and loss margin of the CPR over an extended period. The conclusion states what appears to be obvious, that the railway had a profound impact on the "strength and character of the nation." This seems patent today; it was not then. At the time, very little work was being done on Canadian history. ^[18]

Innis argued that "the history of the Canadian Pacific Railroad is primarily the history of the spread of Western civilization over the northern half of the North American continent."^[19] As Robert Babe notes, the railway brought industrialization, transporting coal and building supplies to manufacturing sites. It was also a kind of communications medium that contributed to the spread of European civilization in at least two ways:

"First, and perhaps most obviously, it was a medium for transporting across the North American continent people and goods originating in Europe; hence, it caused messengers {European immigrants, with their cultures, goals, languages, priorities), and messages (for example, artifacts produced in Europe), to touch the lives of Native peoples and immigrant settlers. Second, and even more fundamentally, the CPR was itself a message: the equipment of the CPR comprised a massive, energy-consuming, fast-moving, powerful, capital-intensive 'sign' dropped into the very midst of indigenous peoples, whose entire way of life was disrupted, and eventually shattered as a result."^[20]

Innis's study of the Canadian Pacific Railway was only the first in which he attempted to demonstrate that "technology is not something external to Canadian being; but on the contrary, is the necessary condition and lasting consequence of Canadian existence." ^[21] It also reflected Innis's lifelong interest in the exercise of economic and political power. His CPR history ends, for example, with a recounting of Western grievances against economic policies, such as high freight rates and the steep import tariffs designed to protect fledgling Canadian manufacturers. Westerners complained that this National Policy funnelled money from Prairie farmers into the pockets of the Eastern business establishment. "Western Canada," Innis wrote, "has paid for the development of Canadian nationality, and it would appear that it must continue to pay. The acquisitiveness of Eastern Canada shows little sign of abatement." ^[22]

University of Chicago

The University of Chicago
Motto	Crescat scientia; vita excolatur (Latin for "Let knowledge grow from more to more; and so be human life enriched.")[23]
Location	Chicago, IL, USA

Harold Innis's two years of postgraduate study at the University of Chicago had a profound influence on his later work. His interest in economics deepened and he decided to become a professional economist. Innis was especially inspired by Professor Frank Knight. According to biographer Donald Creighton, "Knight was refreshingly skeptical and provocative in his approach to his subject; and he aroused Innis's interest in economics, not only by giving him a new range of knowledge, but also by making him feel how little he knew."^[24] The economics faculty at Chicago questioned abstract and universalist neoclassical theories, then in vogue, arguing that general rules for economic policy should be derived from specific case studies.^[25][26]

Innis was also influenced by the university's two eminent communications scholars, George Herbert Mead and Robert E. Park. Although he took no classes from these famous professors, Innis absorbed their idea that communication was much more than the transmission of information. James W. Carey writes that Mead and Park "characterized communication as the entire process whereby a culture is brought into existence, maintained in time, and sedimented into institutions."^[27]

Finally at Chicago, Innis was exposed to the ideas of Thorstein Veblen, the iconoclastic thinker who drew on his deep knowledge of philosophy and economics to write scathing critiques of contemporary thought and culture. Veblen had left Chicago years before, but his ideas were still strongly felt there and Innis never forgot them. In The Theory of the Leisure Class for example, Veblen contends that people conspicuously acquire luxury consumer goods to impress others. An expensive coat may keep a man warm, but it also sends powerful messages about his economic and social status. This combination of economic theory with communications is characteristic of Innis's writing too.^[28]

Innis got his first taste of university teaching at Chicago. He delivered several introductory economics courses and, eventually married Mary Quayle, who had been one of his students. Biographer Paul Heyer writes that "Mary's penchant for literature and the arts would help temper Innis's more hard-nosed social science inclination. She also did significant research and publishing in a variety of areas."^[29]

The staples thesis

"Dirt" research

University of Toronto
Motto	Velut arbor ævo (As a tree through the ages)
Location	Toronto, Ontario, USA

In 1920, Innis joined the department of political economy at the University of Toronto. He was assigned to teach courses in commerce, economic history and economic theory. He also delivered a weekly evening course in economics to members of the Workers' Educational Association in Hamilton, Ontario, about 40 miles away. Innis worked hard on his teaching, gathering new documents and maps to supplement his lectures. He decided to focus his scholarly research on Canadian economic history, a hugely neglected subject, and he settled on the fur trade as his first area of study. Furs had brought French and English traders to Canada, motivating them to travel west along the continent's interlocking lake and river systems to the Pacific coast. Innis realized that he would not only need to search out archival documents to understand the history of the fur trade, he would have to travel the country himself, at his own expense, gathering masses of firsthand information.^[30] Thus, Innis travelled extensively beginning in the summer of 1924 when he and a friend paddled an 18-foot canvas-covered canoe hundreds of miles down the Peace River to Lake Athabaska; then down the Slave River to Great Slave Lake. They completed their journey down the Mackenzie, (Canada's longest river) to the Arctic Ocean on a small Hudson's Bay Company tug.^[31] During his travels, Innis supplemented his fur research by gathering information on other staple products such as lumber, pulp and paper, minerals, grain and fish.

In 1926, he visited the Yukon and the Klondike and the next summer travelled through Northern Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes He went down the Hollinger Mines at Timmins and spent days in the grain elevators at Port Arthur. In 1929, he went west and then up the newly-completed Hudson's Bay Railway to the port of Churchill; in 1930, he was in Newfoundland investigating the outports and the techniques of the fisheries. By the early 1940s, the only places in the country Innis had not visited were the Western Arctic and the east side of Hudson's Bay.^[32]

Everywhere Innis went his methods were the same. He interviewed everyone connected with the production of staple products and he listened to people's stories. He was gathering what he referred to as "dirt" experience to supplement the extensive research he had already conducted in the National Archives in Ottawa.

He 'ransacked' the towns he visited in the same way he did the archives. He set to work immediately, searching out all the installations he considered important and striking up conversations whenever he met a character who seemed to have an interesting story to tell. He moved on equally quickly when he exhausted the major institutions. He made copious notes along the way...As a result, Innis, while he was still a young professor, gained a reputation with the public as well as his colleagues as someone who 'knew what he was talking about' because he had seen so much of it at first hand.^[33]

The fur trade

Harold Innis's interest in the development of empire-building nations and the relationship between empires and marginalized colonies was developed in his classic study, The Fur Trade in Canada (1930). Innis's economic history of the fur trade from the early 16th century to the 1920s was his "first great work."^[34] Like his lengthy book on the CPR, The Fur Trade in Canada is crammed with statistics, historical facts, lists and charts. But the book also draws sweeping conclusions about the complex and frequently devastating effects of the fur trade on aboriginal peoples; about how furs as staple products induced an enduring economic dependence among the European immigrants who settled in the new colony and about how the fur trade ultimately shaped Canada's political destiny.


The book, which begins with an introductory chapter on the beaver, concludes that Canada's modern boundaries coincide with the fur-trading areas that were established as French and English traders pushed further into the interior of the continent until they finally reached the Pacific. Innis famously writes that Canada "emerged not in spite of geography but because of it."^[35]


Innis's account of the the fur trade as "the history of contact between two civilizations, the European and the North American," focuses on the radical effects of new techniques and technologies.^[36] Historian Christopher Moore writes that the beaver hat, a new style of headgear, became popular in Europe in the late 1500s with long-term consequences for Canadian trade and settlement.

"Hats made with beaver felt would remain firm, waterproof, and durable in any shape or style, and after about 1600 the beaver felt hat entered into two and a half centuries of prominence. Suddenly, the beaver pelts supplied by Canadian native trappers and traders emerged from Europe's luxury fur market to become a staple of commerce. Of an appeal to the sartorial fancy of baroque-age English gentlemen, a great colonial empire was made."^[37]

Aboriginal peoples contributed tools and techniques that made it possible for European traders to survive and to travel long distances in search of new sources of furs: Birch-bark canoes for spring, summer and fall travel; snowshoes and toboggans for the snowy winters; with Indian corn, pemmican and wild game for sustenance and clothing.

"And what did the Indian peoples -- who in Canada are now referred to as First Nations -- get in return? A variety of European goods that included knives, axes, glass beads, combs, copper and iron kettles (which were highly prized), guns, (which exacerbated intertribal warfare), and smallpox (which exacerbated genocide). Innis's dependency thesis -- which in its classic formulation is used to assess the subservient position of the colonies with respect to wants emanating from the centres of European imperialist power -- is used here to assess the crippling of indigenous cultures resulting from the reliance on, perhaps addiction to is a more appropriate phrase, goods supplied to them by the colonists."^[38]

Innis points out that guns made it much easier for aboriginal hunters to kill beavers and, as the animals dwindled in numbers, there was more armed conflict over hunting territories. "The new technology with its radical innovations," Innis writes, "brought about a rapid shift in the prevailing Indian culture as to lead to wholesale destruction of the peoples concerned by warfare and disease. The disappearance of the beaver and of the Indians necessitated the extension of European organization to the interior."^[39]

It would not be the first time in Canadian economic history that resource depletion would lead to upheavals in local economies. Innis argued that a country dependent on the export of staple products would always be vulnerable both to disruptions in the sources of supply and to the whims of export markets. In the case of beaver fur, for example, a slight change in fashion in sophisticated metropolitan centres like London and Paris could have devastating effects in a marginal "backwoods" colony dependent on exporting staples to finance its imports of European manufactured goods.


"The economic history of Canada has been dominated by the discrepancy between the centre and margin of Western civilization," Innis concludes.^[40] For him, as Donald Creighton points out, Canada's "economic axis was a great competitive east-west trading system, founded on the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes, one end of which lay in the metropolitan centres of western Europe and the other in the hinterland of North America. It was a transoceanic as well as a transcontinental system; and from Europe, from both France and Great Britain, had come the men, the capital, and goods --- the ideas, institutions and creative power --- by which Canada had been enabled to maintain its identity and its separateness in the new world."^[41]

The cod fishery

After the publication of his book on the fur trade, Innis turned to a study of an earlier staple -- the cod fished for centuries off the eastern coasts of North America, especially the Grand Banks of Newfoundland.



The result was The Cod Fisheries: The History of an International Economy published 10 years after the fur trade study. Innis tells the detailed history of competing empires in the exploitation of a teeming, natural resource -- a history that ranges over five hundred years. He begins by citing a report recounting John Cabot's 1497 voyage to North America that marvels about how "the sea there is swarming with fish, which can be taken not only with the net but in baskets let down with a stone, so that it sinks in the water."^[42] This abundance attracted various European nations, but Spain dominated the fishery until the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. The British then took over with the French and later, American colonists, as their main rivals.^[43]


Throughout his 590-page study, Innis focuses on the complex inter-relationships among economics, culture and technology. He writes, for example, that the English were able to dominate the fishery after developing a method of curing their catches onshore, then transporting the dried fish to Mediterranean countries where there was a demand for a higher protein diet. This combined with consumer preferences for dried fish over cod packed in brine meant higher prices, especially in Catholic countries where the church required the regular consumption of fish. Thus, dried cod sold in Spain allowed England to receive substantial amounts of the precious metals that the Spanish were bringing from their colonies in the New World.^[44] "Cod from Newfoundland was the lever by which she [England] wrested her share of the riches of the New World from Spain."^[45]


Innis shows how the cod fishery was interwoven economically with the slave trade and international markets for such other products as sugar, tobacco and rum. He argues that rivalry between the British and the colonists in New England led to the American Revolution.^[46] While his study of the fur trade focused on the continental interior with its interlocking rivers and lakes, The Cod Fisheries looks outward at global trade and empire showing the far-reaching effects of one staple product, both on imperial centres and on marginal colonies such as Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and New England. Biographer, John Watson argues that the book foreshadowed Innis's later work exploring the relationships between communications technologies and the rise and fall of empires.^[47]

Growing influence

Career in the 1930s

Aside from his work on The Cod Fisheries, Innis wrote extensively in the 1930s about other staple products such as minerals and wheat as well as Canada's immense economic problems in the Great Depression. During the summers of 1932 and 1933, he travelled to the West to see the effects of the Depression for himself.^[48] The next year, in an essay entitled, The Canadian Economy and the Depression, Innis outlined the plight of "a country susceptible to the slightest ground-swell of international disturbance," yet beset by regional differences that made it difficult to devise effective solutions. He described a Prairie economy dependent on the export of wheat, yet afflicted by severe drought, on the one hand, and the increased political power of Canada's growing cities, sheltered from direct reliance on the staples trade, on the other. The result was political conflict and a breakdown in federal-provincial relations. "We lack vital information on which to base prospective policies to meet this situation," Innis warned, because of "the weak position of the social sciences in Canada."^[49]




Innis's reputation as a "public intellectual" was growing steadily and, in 1934, he was invited to serve on a provincial Royal Commission to examine Nova Scotia's economic problems. He had visited the province repeatedly and was in the midst of his research on the cod fishery, so he felt well qualified for the task. The next year, he helped establish The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science. In 1936, he was appointed a full U. of T. professor and a year later, he became the head of the university's Department of Political Economy.^[50]


Innis was appointed president of the Canadian Political Science Association in 1938. His inaugural address, entitled The Penetrative Powers of the Price System, must have baffled his listeners as he ranged over centuries of economic history jumping abruptly from one topic to the next linking monetary developments to patterns of trade and settlement.^[51] The address was an ambitious attempt to show the disruptive effects of new technologies culminating in the modern shift from an industrial system based on coal and iron to the newest sources of industrial power, electricity, oil and steel. Innis also tried to show the commercial effects of mass circulation newspapers, made possible by expanded newsprint production, and of the new medium of radio which "threatens to circumvent the walls imposed by tariffs and to reach across boundaries frequently denied to other media of communication." Both media, Innis argued, stimulated the demand for consumer goods and both promoted nationalism.

Freedom of the press and freedom of speech have always been relative terms assuming a moderate tolerance. Newspaper space involves a substantial outlay of funds as does an hour's broadcasting. In private conversation where talk is said to be cheap, one is inclined to revise Mark Twain's dictum and to say that we have freedom of speech and freedom of the press and not the good sense not to use either of them. Small talk, bores, and other terms are in constant demand. In so-called conferences freedom of speech is paraded as a special feature, but it usually amounts to common scolding or saying things calculated to get the conference into the newspapers -- in other words, advertising space for nothing.^[52]

Innis was also a central participant in an international project that produced 25 scholarly volumes between 1936 and 1945. It was a series called The Relations of Canada and the United States overseen by James T. Shotwell, director of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Innis edited and wrote prefaces for the volumes contributed by Canadian scholars. His own study of the cod fisheries also appeared as part of the series. His work with Shotwell enabled Innis to gain access to Carnegie money to further Canadian academic research. As John Watson points out, "the project offered one of the few sources of research funds in rather lean times."^[53]

Politics in the Great Depression

The era of the "Dirty Thirties" with its mass unemployment, poverty and despair gave rise to Canadian political movements on both the right and left. In Alberta, for example, the radio evangelist William "Bible Bill" Aberhart led his right-wing Social Credit party to victory in 1935. Three years earlier in Calgary, Alberta, social reformers had founded a new political party on the left, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation or CCF. It advocated democratic socialism and a mixed economy with public ownership of key industries. Frank Underhill, one of Innis's colleagues at the University of Toronto was a founding member of the CCF. Innis and Underhill had both been members of an earlier group at the university that declared itself "dissatisfied with the policies of the two major [political] parties in Canada" and that aimed at "forming a definite body of progressive opinion." In 1931, Innis presented a paper to the group on "Economic Conditions in Canada," but he later recoiled from participating in party politics, denouncing partisans like Underhill as "hot gospellers."^[54]


Innis maintained that scholars had no place in active politics and that instead, they should devote themselves, first to research on public problems, and then to the production of knowledge based on critical thought. He saw the university, with its emphasis on dialogue, open-mindedness and skepticism, as an institution that could foster such thinking and research. "The university could provide an environment," he wrote, "as free as possible from the biases of the various institutions that form the state, so that its intellectuals could continue to seek out and explore other perspectives."^[55]
Innis's sympathy for the plight of western farmers or urban, unemployed workers did not lead him to embrace socialism as other colleagues such as Frank Underhill and Eric Havelock did. He distrusted political "solutions" imported from elsewhere, especially those based on Marxist analysis with its emphasis on class conflict. He worried too that as Canada's ties with Britain weakened, the country would fall under the spell of American ideas without developing its own based on Canada's unique circumstances. "He discerned with accuracy," Havelock wrote many years later, "the increasing militarization of the politics and economy of the U.S., at a time when few if any American liberals showed any awareness of it." Havelock added:

He has been called the radical conservative of his day -- not a bad designation of a complex mind, clear sighted, cautious, perhaps at bottom pessimistic in areas where thinkers we would label 'progressive' felt less difficulty in taking a stand; never content to select only one or two elements in a complicated equation in order to build a quick-order policy or program; far ranging enough in intellect to take in the whole sum of the factors, and comprehend their often contradictory effects.^[56]

In spite of their political differences, Innis came to Frank Underhill's defence when Underhill was threatened with dismissal because of his perceived lack of loyalty to Great Britain on the eve of World War II. Innis successfully defended his colleague and fellow war veteran, threatening to resign if Underhill lost his professorship.^[57]

Career in the 1940s

In the 1940s, Harold Innis reached the height of his influence in both academic circles and Canadian society. In 1941, he helped establish the American-based, Economic History Association and its Journal of Economic History. He later became the association's second president. Innis also played a central role in founding two important sources for the funding of academic research: the Canadian Social Science Research Council (1940) and the Humanities Research Council of Canada (1944).^[58] (Today the two councils exist as one, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.)^[59]


In 1944, the University of New Brunswick awarded Innis an honorary degree, as did his old alma mater, McMaster University. Université Laval, the University of Manitoba and the University of Glasgow would also confer honorary degrees in 1947-48.^[60]




In 1945, Innis spent nearly a month in the Soviet Union where he had been invited to attend the 220th anniversary celebrations marking the founding of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. It was his first experience of air travel. His biographers report that Innis was unsettled by this trip. "It may seem ridiculous to think that Marx should be used to open up Russia to the industrial techniques of the West, but so it seems," Innis wrote to a friend.^[61] Later, in his essay, Reflections on Russia, he mused about the differences between the Soviet "producer" economy and the West's "consumer" ethos.

[A]n economy which emphasizes consumer's goods is characterized by communication industries largely dependent on advertising and by constant efforts to reach the largest number of readers or listeners; an economy emphasizing producer's goods is characterized by communications industries largely dependent on government support. As a result of this contrast, a common public opinion in Russia and the West is hard to achieve.^[62]

Innis's trip to Moscow and Leningrad came shortly before U.S.-Soviet rivalry led to the hostility of the Cold War. Innis lamented this rise in international tensions.^[63] He saw the Soviet Union as a stabilizing counterbalance to the American Empire with its emphasis on commercialism, the individual and constant change. For Innis, Russia was a society within the Western tradition,not an alien civilization. He abhored the nuclear arms race, seeing it as the triumph of force over knowledge, a modern form of the medieval Inquisition. "The Middle Ages burned its heretics," he wrote, "and the modern age threatens them with atom bombs."^[64]


During the 1940s, Innis began studying pulp and paper, an industry of central importance to the Canadian economy. Canada is the world's largest exporter of forest products and its biggest producer of newsprint.^[65] Innis's research on pulp and paper provided the crossover point from his work on staple products to his communications studies.^[66] Biographer Paul Heyer writes that Innis "followed pulp and paper through its subsequent stages: newspapers and journalism, books and advertising. In other words, from looking at a natural resource-based industry he turned his attention to a cultural industry in which information, and ultimately knowledge, was a commodity that circulated, had value, and empowered those who controlled it."^[67]

In 1946, Innis was elected president of the Royal Society of Canada, the country's senior body of scientists and scholars. That same year, he served on the Manitoba Royal Commission on Adult Education and published Political Economy in the Modern State, a collection of his speeches and essays that reflected both his staples research and his new work in communications. In 1947, Innis was appointed the University of Toronto's dean of graduate studies. In 1948, he delivered lectures at the University of London and Nottingham University. He also gave the prestigious Beit lectures at Oxford, later published in his book Empire and Communications. In 1949, Innis added to his heavy workload by agreeing to become a commissioner on the federal government's Royal Commission on Transportation, a position that involved extensive travel across Canada at a time when his health was starting to fail.^[68]

Innis died of prostate cancer in 1952. To commemorate him, Innis College at the University of Toronto was named in his honour as well as Innis Library at McMaster University.

Communications theories

Time and space

Improvements in communication...make for increased difficulties of understanding.

– Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication^[69]

One of Harold Innis's primary contributions to the field of communications, as expressed in Empire and Communications, was to apply the dimensions of time and space to various media. He divided media into time-binding and space-binding types. Time-binding media are durable. They include clay or stone tablets, hand-copied manuscripts on parchment or vellum and oral sources such as Homer's epic poems. These are intended to last for many generations, but tend to reach only local audiences. Space-binding media are more ephemeral. They include modern media such as radio, television, and mass circulation newspapers which convey information that is meant to reach as many as possible over long distances, but will not last long in time. While time-binding media favour stability, community, tradition and religion, space-binding media facilitate rapid change, materialism, secularism and empire.

The concepts of time and space reflect the significance of media to civilization. Media which emphasize time are those which are durable in character such as parchment, clay and stone. The heavy materials are suited to the development of architecture and sculpture. Media which emphasize space are apt to be less durable and light in character such as papyrus and paper. The latter are suited to wide areas in administration and trade. The conquest of Egypt by Rome gave access to supplies of papyrus which became the basis of a large administrative empire. Materials which emphasize time favour decentralization and hierarchical types of institutions, while those which emphasize space favour centralization and systems of government less hierarchical in character.^[70]

The Canadian scholar Robert Babe summarizes Innis's ideas by pointing out that societies which depend solely on time-binding media do not read and write. They are oral and tribal. Although leadership tends to be hierarchical, time-bound societies also operate by consensus. Since, in their purest form, time-bound cultures do not rely on written records, they must preserve their traditions in story, song and myth handed down for generations. For them memory is of crucial importance; they revere the wisdom of elders and favour concrete over abstract forms of thought. On the other hand, societies that depend on space-binding media such as printed newspapers and books "accord high value to abstract knowledge and to exercising control over space, but place little value on, even denigrate, tradition and continuity with the past. Their mode of thought differs from what characterizes oral societies, being comparatively more linear, more rational, more detached, less intimate or personal, and less reliant upon tradition."^[71]


The encounter of European traders from the imperial centres of France and Britain with the aboriginal tribes of North America that Innis chronicled in The Fur Trade in Canada is a poignant example of what can happen when two different civilizations meet --- one traditional and oriented to preserving its culture in time and the other bent on spreading its influence over long distances. European guns used in war and conquest, for example, enabled the indigenous peoples to hunt more efficiently, but led to the rapid destruction of their food supply and of the beaver they depended on to obtain European goods. Conflicts over hunting territories led to warfare, made more deadly by European bullets.^[72] And all, "disturbed the balance which had grown up previous to the coming of the European."^[73]

Balance, bias and empire

Harold Innis examined the rise and fall of ancient empires as a way of tracing the effects of communications media. He looked at media that led to the growth of an empire; those that sustained it during its periods of success, and then, the communications changes that hastened an empire's collapse. He tried to show that media 'biases' toward time or space affected the complex inter-relationships needed to sustain an empire -- especially the partnership between the creative thought and knowledge necessary to create and maintain it on the one hand, and the power (or force) required to expand and defend it, on the other. For Innis, the interplay between knowledge and power was always a crucial factor in understanding empire.^[74]

The sword and pen worked together. Power was increased by concentration in a few hands, specialization of function was enforced, and scribes with leisure to keep and study records contributed to the advancement of knowledge and thought. The written record, signed, sealed and swiftly transmitted was essential to military power and the extension of government. Small communities were written into large states and states were consolidated into empire.^[75]

Innis warned however, that such generalizations tended to obscure the differences between empires. So, he embarked on specific studies of the civilizations of ancient Egypt, Babylonia and Mesopotamia; as well as of the effects of the oral tradition on Greek civilization and the written tradition on the Roman Empire. His reflections appear in separate chapters in his book Empire and Communications along with additional chapters on the combined effects of parchment and paper in the Middle Ages, and paper and the printing press in the development of modern societies.^[76]




Biographer John Watson warns against the tendency to apply Innis's concept of media 'bias' in a mechanical or deterministic way. He writes that Innis "emphasizes, in dealing with concrete historical cases, the necessity of a balance of various media whose predispositions [or biases] complement each other to make for a successful imperial project." Watson points out that for Innis, balance was crucial in sustaining an empire. Innis examined each empire to discover how time-binding and space-binding media contributed to the necessary balance between power and knowledge and among ruling groups -- religious, political and military.^[77] As Innis himself wrote:

"Concentration on a medium of communication implies a bias in the cultural development of the civilization concerned either towards an emphasis on space and political organization or towards an emphasis on time and religious organization. Introduction of a second medium tends to create conditions suited to the growth of empire. The Byzantine empire emerged from a fusion of a bias incidental to papyrus in relation to political organization and of parchment in relation to ecclesiastical organization."^[78]

Innis argued that a balance between the spoken word and writing contributed to the flourishing of ancient Greece in the time of Plato, perhaps the greatest of Western philosophers. Plato conveyed his ideas by writing down the conversations of Socrates thus "preserving the power of the spoken word on the written page." Aristotle, Innis wrote, regarded Plato's style as "halfway between poetry and prose." Plato was able to arrive at new philosophical positions "through the use of dialogues, allegories and illustrations. His later work reflected the growing power of the written word and of prose."^[79] This balance between the time-biased medium of speech and the space-biased medium of writing was eventually upset, Innis argued, as the oral tradition gave way to the dominance of writing and the torch of empire eventually passed to Rome.^[80]

Monopolies of knowledge

In his 1947 presidential address to the Royal Society of Canada, Innis remarked: "I have attempted to suggest that Western civilization has been profoundly influenced by communication and that marked changes in communications have had important implications." He went on to mention the evolution of communications media from the cuneiform script inscribed on clay tablets in ancient Mesopotamia to the advent of radio in the 20th century. "In each period I have attempted to trace the implications of the media of communication for the character of knowledge and to suggest that a monopoly or oligopoly of knowledge is built up to the point that equilibrium is disturbed."^[81] Innis argued, for example, that a "complex system of writing" such as cuneiform script resulted in the growth of a "special class" of scribes.^[82] The long training required to master such writing ensured that relatively few people would belong to this privileged and aristocratic class. As Paul Heyer explains:

In the beginning, which for Innis means Mesopotamia, there was clay, the reed stylus used to write on it, and the wedge-shaped cuneiform script. Thus did civilization arise, along with an elite group of scribe priests who eventually codified laws. Egypt followed suit, using papyrus, the brush, and hieroglyphic writing.^[83]

Innis wrote that the ebb and flow of Egypt's ancient empire partly reflected weaknesses or limitations imposed by "the inflexibility of religious institutions supported by a monopoly over a complex system of writing."

Writing was a difficult and specialized art requiring long apprenticeship, and reading implied a long period of instruction. The god of writing was closely related to the leading deities and reflected the power of the scribe over religion. The scribe had the full qualifications of a special profession and was included in the upper classes of kings, priests, nobles and generals, in contrast with peasants, fishermen, artisans and labourers. Complexity favoured increasing control under a monopoly of priests and the confinement of knowledge to special classes.^[84]

Innis argued that this priestly or scribal monopoly disturbed the necessary balance between the religious bias toward time and continuity, and the political bias toward space and power. "A successful empire," he wrote, "required adequate appreciation of the problems of space which were in part military and political, and of problems of time which were in part dynastic and biological and in part religious." He ended his essay on ancient Egypt with this terse sentence: "Monopoly over writing supported an emphasis on religion and the time concept which defeated efforts to solve the problem of space."^[85]


According to Harold Innis, monopolies of knowledge eventually face challenges to their power, especially with the arrival of new media. He pointed for example, to the monasteries that spread throughout Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. Their monopoly of knowledge depended on their control over the production of the time-binding medium of parchment and hand-copied manuscripts written in Latin. Power was vested therefore, in a scribal and literate, religious elite. The largely illiterate laity depended on priests to interpret the scriptures and on image-driven media such as paintings and statues that illustrated the central figures in Biblical stories.


But the space-binding medium of paper imported from China, Innis wrote, facilitated challenges from Islam and later from a rising commercial class. "Paper supported the growth of trade and cities and of education beyond the control of the monasteries, and in turn of the Church and the cathedrals."^[86] He went on the note that paper supported the rise of vernacular or more localized languages reducing Latin's cultural sway.


Innis wrote that the Catholic Church fought to preserve its time-oriented monopoly of knowledge with the Inquisition, but eventually paper achieved even greater power with the invention of the printing press around the middle of the 15th century. Now, the balance shifted decisively in favour of space over time. The Protestant Reformation followed along with European exploration and empire, the rise of science and the evolution of the nation-state.

"The dominance of parchment in the West gave a bias toward ecclesiastical organization which led to the introduction of paper, with its bias toward political organization. With printing, paper facilitated an effective development of the vernaculars and gave expression to their vitality in the growth of nationalism. The adaptability of the alphabet to large-scale machine industry became the basis of literacy, advertising and trade. The book as a specialized product of printing and, in turn, the newspaper strengthened the position of language as a basis of nationalism. In the United States, the dominance of the newspaper led to large-scale development of monopolies of communication in terms of space and implied a neglect of problems of time."^[87]

Innis and McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan was a colleague of Innis's at the University of Toronto. As a young English professor, McLuhan became interested in Innis after he learned that Innis had put his book The Mechanical Bride on the reading list of the fourth-year economics course.^[88] McLuhan built on many of Innis's ideas, going so far as to describe his breakthrough work The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) as a footnote to Innis.^[89]

Innis' theories of political economy, media and society remain highly relevant today: he had a profound influence on critical media theory and communications and, in conjunction with McLuhan, offered groundbreaking Canadian perspectives on the function of communication technologies as key agents in social and historical change. Together, their works advanced a theory of history in which communication is central to social change and transformation. ^[14]

Notable quote

Modern civilization, characterized by an enormous increase in the output of mechanized knowledge with the newspaper, the book, the radio and the cinema, has produced a state of numbness, pleasure, and self-complacency perhaps only equalled by laughing gas. In the words of Oscar Wilde, we have sold our birthright for a mess of facts. The demands of the machine are insatiable. The danger of shaking men out of the soporific results of mechanized knowledge is similar to that of attempting to arouse a drunken man or one who has taken an overdose of sleeping tablets. The necessary violent measures will be disliked. We have had university professors threatened with the loss of their positions for less than this. But I have little hope of making an impression with what I have to say.

– Harold Innis, The Church in Canada^[90]

His works

• A History of the Canadian Pacific Railway - (1923)
• The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History - (1930)
• The Cod Fisheries: The History of an International Economy - (1940)
• Political Economy in the Modern State - (1946)
• The Diary of Simeon Perkins: 1766-1780, ed. - (1948)
• Empire and Communications - (1950)
• The Bias of Communication - (1951)
• The Strategy of Culture - (1952)
• Changing Concepts of Time - (1952)
• Essays in Canadian Economic History - (1956)
• The Idea File of Harold Adams Innis - (1980)

Biographical and Critical Studies

• Acland, C.R. & Buxton, W.J. (1999) Harold Innis in the New Century. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press.
• Angus, I. (1998). The Materiality of Expression: Harold Innis' Communication Theory and the Discursive Turn in the Human Sciences. Canadian Journal of Communication, 23(1), 9-29.
• Babe, Robert. (2000). "The Communication Thought of Harold Adams Innis." In Canadian Communication Thought: Ten Foundational Writers. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 51-88.
• Berger, Carl. (1976). "Harold Innis: The Search for Limits." In The Writing of Canadian History. Toronto: Oxford University Press. 85-111.
• Buxton, W. J. (1998). Harold Innis' Excavation of Modernity: The Newspaper Industry, Communications, and the Decline of Public Life. Canadian Journal of Communication, 23(3), 321-339.
• Carey, J. W. (1967). Harold Adams Innis and Marshall McLuhan. The Antioch Review, 27(1), 5-39.
• Carey, J. W. (1992). "Space, Time and Communications: A Tribute to Harold Innis." In Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society. New York: Routledge. 142-172.
• Cooper, T. W. (1981). McLuhan and Innis: The Canadian Theme of Boundless Exploration. Journal of Communication, 31(3), 153-161.
• Collins, R. (1986). The Metaphor of Dependency and Canadian Communications: The Legacy of Harold Innis. Canadian Journal of Communication, 12(1), 1-19.
• Creighton, Donald. (1957). Harold Adams Innis: Portrait of a Scholar. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
• Garde, R. d. l. (1987). The 1987 Southam Lecture: Mr. Innis, is there life after the "American Empire"? Canadian Journal of Communication (Special Issue), 7-21.
• Havelock, Eric. (1982). Harold A. Innis: a memoir (with a preface by H. Marshall McLuhan). Toronto: Harold Innis Foundation.
• Heyer, Paul. (2003). Harold Innis. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield.
• Innis, Mary Quayle, (1935) An Economic History of Canada. Toronto: Ryerson Press.
• Kroker, Arthur. (1984). Technology and the Canadian Mind: Innis/McLuhan/Grant. Montreal: New World Perspectives.
• McLuhan, Marshall. (2005) "Introduction to the Bias of Communication: [Harold A. Innis first edition 1951.]" In Marshall McLuhan Unbound. Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press. v.8.
• McNally, D. (1981). Staple Theory as Commodity Fetishism: Marx, Innis, and Canadian Political Economy. Studies in Political Economy, 6, 35-63.
• Melody, William; Salter, Liora; Heyer, Paul editors. (1981) Culture, Communication and Dependency: The Tradition of H.A. Innis. Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex Publishing Corporation.
• Neill, Robin. (1972). A New Theory of Value: The Canadian Economics of H.A. Innis. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
• Salutin, R. (1997). Last Call From Harold Innis. Queen's Quarterly, 104(2), 245-259.
• Stamps, Judith. (1995). Unthinking Modernity: Innis, McLuhan and the Frankfurt School. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press.
• Varis, T. (1993). Culture, Communication, and Dependency: A Dialogue with William H. Melody on Harold Innis. Nordicom Review, 1, 11-14.
• Watson, Alexander, John. (2006). Marginal Man: The Dark Vision of Harold Innis. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Notes

References

• Old Messengers, New Media: The Legacy of Innis and McLuhan, a virtual museum exhibition at Library and Archives Canada

See also

• Toronto School of communication theory
• Technological nationalism
• Monopolies of knowledge

External links

• Article on Innis from EH.NET's Encyclopedia

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