Harold Adam Innis: The Bias of History
University of Alberta, Alberta, PhD Thesis, (1998)Abstract
With the benefit of an economist's education at Chicago, Harold Adams Innis learned to see the social impact of technology. His study of Canadian natural resources, in conjunction with transportation systems, taught him to see empire as a pattern of flow. With his staples research programme exhausted, morally driven by issues of war and peace, and concerned by the social power of publishing, he followed newsprint into the marketplace of the big American newspaper. From there Innis investigated publishing technologies back to their origins in time. Conceptually and methodologically, Innis's inquiry into communications media was a parallel replication of the systematic historical method he employed to study staple economies. Harold Innis followed staples into communications where he came to recognize that, whether by the example of beaver pelts or by the example of advertising, he had always been studying the flow of media through empire and civilization.