McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal, 2013
381 pp., $34.95 paperback
A double review with Harold Innis and The North: Appraisals and Contestations
edited by William J. Buxton
McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal, 2013
431 pp., illus., $32.95 paperback
“The history of Canada has been profoundly influenced by the habits of an animal which very fittingly occupies a prominent place on her coat of arms,” begins one of the most groundbreaking histories of our country: The Fur Trade in Canada, by Harold A. Innis.
Published in 1930, The Fur Trade torpedoed the received wisdom of its time — that this country was an artificial construct of disparate colonies that clung together in 1867 to avoid the almost irresistible pull of its powerful southern neighbour. Not so, argued the thirty-six-year-old assistant professor at the University of Toronto: “The present Dominion emerged not in spite of geography but because of it.” Thanks to the beaver, Innis wrote, Canada had a coast-tocoast geographical coherence based on three centuries of fur trade, which had determined not only its boundaries but also its financial institutions and expectations of government.
Although Innis continues to loom large within universities, his scholarship has been undermined by academic fashion and later interpretation. His thesis that the Canadian economy was shaped by dependence on staples (fur, fish, lumber, wheat) is regarded as too Central Canadian, while his later work on communications is frankly impenetrable. One commentator suggested that, in works like Empire and Communications (1950), the author had a gift for “snatching obscurity out of the jaws of clarity.” Outside academic life, Innis has been completely overshadowed by his more glamorous student Marshall McLuhan, the media theorist who coined bumpersticker intellectualisms such as “the medium is the message” and appeared in a Woody Allen movie.
Yet Innis’s work resonates today. The Fur Trade and (to a lesser extent) The Cod Fisheries (1940) are grounded in what the author liked to call “dirt research” and are the kind of solid narrative histories that are enjoying a revival. He travelled the routes opened up by fur traders, talking to people and recording their memories as he went. He told the story of the great trading companies not from the point of view of the comfortably housed managers but from the perspective of those on the ground. In particular, he examined the impact the fur trade had on First Nations, who played an essential role in determining the extent of the trade and its profitability. The economics of the fur trade shaped the economy of Canada, with large transcontinental financial institutions headquartered in eastern Canada (Montreal in his day, Toronto today) and robust partnerships between government and private enterprise.
Innis also embraced northern Canada as a field for adventure, mineral extraction, scientific exploration, and tourism. His own canoe trips during the 1920s down northern rivers (including the Mackenzie, Peace, Slave, and Yukon) had fired his imagination as well as his research interests: Badly wounded at Vimy Ridge, he had begun his travels as a limping scholar and emerged as a vigorous and healthy Canadian nationalist.
The combination of compelling personal biography and contemporary priorities (Canadian reliance on primary products, the strategic importance of the Canadian Arctic, First Nations’ concerns) makes Innis ripe for reconsideration. Two new volumes suggest that Innis may be emerging from the shadows, and, although neither volume is written for a general reader, each shines a new light on one of our most profound thinkers.
The author of Emergence and Empire is an intellectual historian at Brock University who holds a Canada Research Chair in Digital Humanities. John Bonnett’s purpose is to analyze Innis’s work through the new lens of change theory. Unlike most commentators, he argues that both Innis’s early work on staples and his later explorations of different vehicles of communication are all part of the same sustained exploration of how economies, societies, and cultures change. Bonnett suggests that Innis was constrained not only by the analytic tools available to him but also by the limitations of print culture — his later, more difficult publications that are often “data dumps” would have worked better as websites with hyperlinks.
“Harold Innis was a prophet,” argues Bonnett, “not because he was obscure, and not because he was hyperbolic, but rather because he produced writings that, in the end, have proven to be prescient.” Bonnett’s book is a tough read, but its concluding chapter is a lucid description of Innis’s intellectual development — and his significance today.
Harold Innis and The North began as a series of papers for a 2007 conference held at Concordia University, where editor William Buxton is a professor of communications studies. Buxton argues that Innis scholarship has been too closely focused on his staples theory, which spawned the Laurentian school of Canadian history, to the neglect of Innis’s long-standing engagement with the North. Throughout his career, Innis visited, wrote about, and spoke about the North (including both Labrador and the Soviet North), and he never regarded it — unlike too many of his contemporaries — as an ice-bound wilderness.
Buxton and his fellow authors reveal how large a role the North played in Innis’s own imagination, as both an integral part of the Canadian economy and a counterbalance to Americanizing tendencies elsewhere in Canada.
— Charlotte Gray (Read bio)
Charlotte Gray is a past chair of Canada's History Society and a past winner of the Pierre Berton Award.