The one-room schoolhouse in Otterville, officially known as S.S.#1 South Norwich. The photo was taken around 1906. Innis is the boy with the cap, fifth from the right, back row.
The one-room schoolhouse in Otterville, officially known as S.S.#1 South Norwich. The photo was taken around 1906. Innis is the boy with the cap, fifth from the right, back row.
The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History
(In The Fur Trade in Canada Harold presents several histor...)
In The Fur Trade in Canada Harold presents several histories in one: social history through the clash between colonial and aboriginal cultures; economic history in the development of the West as a result of Eastern colonial and European needs; and transportation history in the case of the displacement of the canoe by the York boat.
(Political Economy in the Modern State is Harold Innis’s t...)
Political Economy in the Modern State is Harold Innis’s transitional and, in some respects, his most transformative book. Completed in 1946, it is a collection of fifteen chapters plus a remarkable Preface selected and crafted to address four main themes: the problem of power and peace in the post-War era; the ascent of specialized and mechanized forms of knowledge involving, most particularly, the media, the state, and the academy; the crisis facing civilization and, more generally, the modern penchant for unreflexive short-term thinking in the face of mounting contradictions; and Innis’s growing focus on what would be called media bias.
(It's been said that without Harold A. Innis there could h...)
It's been said that without Harold A. Innis there could have been no Marshall McLuhan. He presents his own influential concepts of oral communication, time and space bias, and monopolies of knowledge.
(One of the most influential books ever published in Canad...)
One of the most influential books ever published in Canada, Harold A. Innis's The Bias of Communication has played a major part in reshaping our understanding of history, communication, and media theory.
(An elaboration of Innis's earlier theories, Changing Conc...)
An elaboration of Innis's earlier theories, Changing Concepts of Time looks at then-new technological changes in communication and considers the different ways in which space and time are perceived. Innis explores military implications of the U.S. constitution, freedom of the press, communication monopolies, culture, and press support of presidential candidates, among other interesting and diverse topics.
Staples, Markets, and Cultural Change: Selected Essays
(The essays in this collection address a variety of themes...)
The essays in this collection address a variety of themes, including the rise of industrialism and the expansion of international markets, staples trades, critical factors in Canadian development, metropolitanism and nationality, the problems of adjustment, the political economy of communications, the economics of cultural change, and Innis's conception of the role of the intellectual as citizen. Innis succeeded as few others have in providing an astute and comprehensive account of the economic and social forces shaping modernity.
Harold Innis was a Canadian academic, who spent his career in the Department of Political Economy at the University of Toronto. His writings on the economic history of his native country and on communication had a tremendous influence on the world of Canadian scholarship.
Background
Harold was born on November 5, 1894, in Oxford County, Ontario, Canada. As a boy, he loved the rhythms and routines of farm life and he never forgot his rural origins. 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.
Education
Innis attended the one-room schoolhouse in Otterville and the community's high school. He studied at McMaster University and received a Bachelor of Arts in 1916, Master of Arts in 1918. Later, he finished the University of Chicago with Ph.D. in 1920.
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, rural school was not for him.
Innis joined the army for a brief time during World War I after having received a bachelor’s degree from McMaster University. His military service abruptly ended, however, when he was badly wounded at Vimy Ridge. From that point on Innis dedicated his life exclusively to scholarly pursuits, and he began work right away on his master’s thesis while still recuperating in the hospital for a year following his injury. He was given a job as a teacher in the political economy department at the University of Toronto where he stayed until his death in 1952.
He wrote The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History, a biography of Peter Pond: Fur Trader and Adventurer, published in 1930. Settlement and the Mining Frontier appeared in 1936, followed by The Cod Fisheries: The History of an International Economy in 1940. As E. P. Hohman wrote in his review of The Cod Fisheries for the Journal of Politics and Economics, “this works is a monument of erudition in the field of meticulous, factual economic history. The reader is always impressed and sometimes overwhelmed by the evidences of beaver-like industry displayed in the uninterrupted flow of facts and figures in the hundreds upon hundreds of footnote references to little-known source materials.”
As handbooks to be utilized by veterans, Innis wrote a series of essays that were assembled under the title Political Economy and the Modern State published in 1946. He also contributed essays along with C. R. Young and J. E. Dales to Engineering and Society, published the same year. During the war years, Innis was also selected to attend the Russian Academy of Sciences 220th-anniversary celebration in the Soviet Union. While there, he kept a detailed journal of his experiences and observations. Published years later in 1981 under the title Innis on Russia, this account reveals Innis’s prescient belief that Westerners had an inadequate understanding of Russia and the ways its people thought.
Innis’s experience of writing about Russia was the beginning of a new kind of academic discipline for him to explore. As William Christian writes in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, “It was at this time that Innis began to undertake his most innovative work, the research that leads many to credit him with founding the field of communications studies.” In 1950 he published Empire and Communications, which contains the texts a series of lectures that he had delivered at Oxford on this subject. This was followed by more essays collected in volumes entitled The Bias of Communication (1951) and Changing Concepts of Time (1952).
At the end of Innis’s life, he was mostly concerned with this subject of communications. In the Dictionary of Literary Biography, William Christian explains Innis’s interest in the topic: “Casting his reflections over all the major civilizations from ancient Egypt to his contemporary world, Innis advanced the hypothesis that the various media of communication influenced the territorial extent and the duration of political organizations.”
In addition to authoring books, Innis became the chairman of his department at the University of Toronto and then in 1947, became dean of the graduate school. He also translated and edited a number of books on topics that were associated with his areas of study. Upon his death from cancer at the age of fifty-eight, Innis had left a varied and important legacy of scholarship.
(It's been said that without Harold A. Innis there could h...)
1950
Religion
Innis became an agnostic in later life, but never lost his interest in religion.
Views
Innis built the staple theory. This theory proposed that the economy of the country evolved as the primary staple product shifted from one thing to another. This development began with the fur trade, which was the main source of income for early European settlers to Canada. Innis points out that the unique characteristics of a beaver pelt allowed trade to develop in certain patterns. The products of different industries - fish, timber, wheat, etc. - had different characteristics and subsequently resulted in their own distinct economic patterns and systems.
Membership
Innis was a member of American Economic History Association.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Harold Adams Innis was, according to William Christian writing in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, “one of the world’s leading economic historians” during the first half of the twentieth century.
Connections
On May 10, 1921 Harold married Mary Emma Quayle. Their children: Mary, Anne, Hugh, Donald.