Harold Adams Innis

Author

• Born: November 5, 1894
• Birthplace: Otterville, Ontario, Canada
• Died: November 8, 1952

Biography

Harold Adams Innis was born on a farm near Otterville, Ontario, Canada, on November 5, 1894, the son of William and Mary Adam Innis. His childhood experience taught him to appreciate hard work and education, and he grew up believing that individual and personal responsibility were of utmost importance. Innis attended local primary and secondary schools, graduating from a high school in Woodstock. He taught briefly before entering McMaster University in Toronto. Attending college was a difficult experience for Innis, who lacked ample funding for his education. Nevertheless, he worked hard and earned a double honors degree in political economy and philosophy in 1916.

Innis aspired to become a lawyer, but the outbreak of World War I led him to enlist for military service. After being hospitalized for a year for severe leg wounds from shrapnel, Innis began work on his M.A. thesis. His World War I experiences led him to become a staunch pacifist, and his thesis was about soldiers returning from the war. Putting his law career goals on hold, he enrolled in the University of Chicago to study economics, earning a Ph.D. in 1920. His doctoral dissertation about the history of the Canadian Pacific Railway was published in 1923 and became an important part of Canada’s economic history. While he was at the University of Chicago, he became acquainted with the theoretician F. H. Knight, whose ideas would contribute to the development of Innis’s intellectual framework. He also met Mary Emma Quayle, an American whom he married in 1921. The couple eventually had four children, two sons and two daughters.

In 1920, Innis accepted an appointment to the political economy department at the University of Toronto, where he worked for the rest of his career. In 1930, Innis published The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History. The book discussed the staple theory of economic development, which maintained that Canada’s economy relied largely on the production of single commodities. In 1937, Innis became head of his department, an appointment that proved to be important for both the University of Toronto and the intellectual development of Canada.

During the 1940’s, Innis published The Cod Fisheries: The History of an International Economy, establishing him as one of the world’s leading economic historians and resulting in his election as president of the American Economic History Association. Innis was one of the first Canadian scholars to be recognized internationally. He declined a generous offer from the University of Chicago because of his loyalty to the University of Toronto. He also had vowed to remain in Canada to ensure that the nation’s universities would be prepared to educate soldiers returning from World War II.

Innis was part of a delegation to the Soviet Union to celebrate the 220th anniversary of the Russian Academy of Sciences; his diary of the event was published in 1981. During the final years of his life, Innis conducted innovative research about communication, publishing two books on the subject: Empire and Communications and The Bias of Communication. Some scholars maintain that his work created the new field of communication studies. He died of cancer in 1952.