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Genealogy of Political Economy 55

tribes, which with bows and arrows had not been strenuous, conducted with guns
were disastrous.” Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada, 20.
139. Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada, 388.
140. I discuss this at length in Babe, Canadian Communication Thought, chapter 3.
141. Watson, Marginal Man, 149.
142. Heyer, Harold Innis, 15.
143. Watson, Marginal Man, 216.
144. Heyer, Harold Innis, 30. See also Ronald J. Deibert, “Between Essentialism
and Constructivism: Harold Innis and World Order Transformations,” in The Toronto
School of Communication Theory, 30–32.
145. Marshall McLuhan, “Introduction,” in Harold A. Innis, The Bias of Commu-
nication (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971), xv.
146. Robin Neill, A New Theory of Value: The Canadian Economics of H. A. Innis
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), 49.
147. Neill, A New Theory of Value, 94, 7.
148. Innis, Empire and Communications, 7.
149. Harold A. Innis, “The Problem of Space,” in The Bias of Communication
(1951; reprint, with an Introduction by Marshall McLuhan, Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1971), 111.
150. Such is the charge often levelled at Innis by anti-political economy re-
searchers, for example Everett Rogers, A History of Communication Study: A Bio-
graphical Approach (New York: Free Press, 1994), 484–89. Robin Neill is one of sev-
eral refuting that charge, writing: “His belief in the existence of creativity as a factor
in economic change eliminated any pretense of deterministic science.” Neill, A New
Theory of Value, 114.
151. Edward Comor, “Harold Innis’s Dialectical Triad,” Journal of Canadian
Studies 29, no. 2 (summer, 1994): 112.
152. Comor, “Harold Innis’s Dialectical Triad,” 115.
153. Comor, “Harold Innis’s Dialectical Triad;” also, Paul Heyer, Communications
and History: Theories of Media, Knowledge, and Civilization (New York: Greenwood
Press, 1988), 115.
154. Innis, Empire and Communications, xiii.
155. Harold A. Innis, The Bias of Communication (1951; reprint, with an Intro-
duction by Marshall McLuhan, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971), xviii.
156. Innis wrote: “Immediately [as] we venture on this inquiry we are compelled
to recognize the bias of the period in which we work. An interest in the bias of other
civilizations may in itself suggest bias of our own. Our knowledge of other civiliza-
tions depends in large part on the character of the media used by each civilization in
so far as it is capable of being preserved or of being made accessible by discovery. .
. . Writing on clay and on stone has been preserved more effectively than on papyrus.
Since durable commodities emphasize time and continuity, studies of civilization
such as Toynbee’s tend to have a bias toward religion and to show how a neglect of
problems of space, notably administration and law. The bias of modern civilization in-
cidental to the newspaper and the radio will presume a perspective in consideration of
civilizations dominated by other media. We can do little more than urge that we must