by Matt Dyce
University of Winnipeg
|
William J. Buxton (ed.), Harold Innis and the North: Appraisals and Contestations. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013, 432 pages. ISBN 9780773541641, $32.95 (paperback)
Few early-20th-century figures continue to stand as tall in Canadian historiog-raphy as Harold Adams Innis. Widely recognized for developing the ‘staples thesis’ through books like The Fur Trade in Canada (1930) and The Cod Fisheries (1940), his principle contribution was in showing how the distribution of resources and the network of Canadian river basins together have guided the exploitation of the North American continent by international markets. For Innis, the political territory of Canada emerged along an east-west axis already shaped by the successive demands for different staple goods that had drawn Europeans into the interior. Though a self-effacing economic historian, it is Innis’s con-tribution to this broad national imagination that has shaped his legacy. He offered a theory that his contemporaries and followers eagerly took up: that of a Canada based on its geography. Historians after Innis either recognized pow-erful deterministic environmental forces described by the Laurentian thesis, or analyzed the forces of centralization and dispersal borne out in Canada’s metropolis-hinterland settlement patterns. Innis remains an important figure for those hoping to understand Canada’s resource economy, which makes this book, edited by William Buxton and his eleven contributors, a timely volume. Together they read Innis through an equally timely concern—the place of the north in Canada—hoping to investigate what the connections reveal. Most of the essays address this question admirably, although not always according to the blueprint set out by the editor.
Through the 1920s and 1930s, Innis made a series of summer voyages to the Mackenzie River, Yukon Territory, northern Manitoba, and Labrador. These trips mark the departure point for many of the essays in this volume. They argue that Innis’s time spent in the north, and the considerable effort he made thinking about it for the remainder of his life (even travelling to Russia as a northern expert with the Soviet Academy of Sciences in the 1940s), deserve greater credit for shaping his writing and role as a public intellectual. Buxton’s introductory essay helpfully lays out what this re-appraisal means, insisting that Innis’s thought was guided by what he witnessed in the north: a second industrial revolution unfolding around the changes propelled by gasoline engines and advancements in transportation. He finds how, rather than noting the influence of physical environment on cultural development, Innis borrowed from the influences of possiblism and the development theories of Thorstein Veblen to examine how, “industrial technology prevailed in the building of civilization, in spite of Canada’s daunting natural terrain” (p. 15). The “cyclonic” development of shipping on the Mackenzie or the Hudson Bay Railway to Churchill was for Innis evidence of a north-south axis of development, not an east-west one as so many historians and others have interpreted. This is just one of the misconceptions Buxton aims to dispel from the traditional hagiography on Innis (established by his reverential colleague and first biographer, Donald Creighton). Buxton suggests that, by breaking apart the larger stories of Innis’s life and writing into “micro-narratives,” we can see his preoccupation with the north, including his development of northern studies at the University of Toronto, his work on the Arctic Survey, his contributions to Canadian state agencies, and his ardent public campaigning for development in the northern frontier. Even his opus, The Fur Trade in Canada, is reopened for questioning, repositioned as “a work that was still in progress” as part of a larger thinking about the north (p. 25).
Some of the chapters in Harold Innis and the North take up the mantle of ‘appraising’ the historiography. George Colpitts considers how Innis’s writing on the economics of conservation might have influenced the staples thesis, Jeff Webb ties his northern travels to the undervalued work on the cod fisheries, while Jim Mochoruk measures his work as an advocate who helped to rescue the north from being seen as a marginal ‘wasteland’ to the rest of Canada. Other essays seem to draw their analyses from elsewhere, many citing Matthew Evenden’s 1999 article, originally published in the Journal of Canadian Studies, “The Northern Vision of Harold Innis,” reprinted in Buxton’s collection to add completeness to the volume. This clearly leads the ‘contestations’ group, as Evenden is less willing to accept Innis’s scholarly distance. He suggests that a northern imagery is more appropriate, showing how Innis accepted older mythologies of the north as a place of regeneration and wove these into a narrative about the rebirth of Canada through a new industrial frontier. Here we also see Innis carefully crafting a career for himself as a public intellectual and booster for northern development, showing scant concern for the ‘marginal’ peoples and First Nations indigenous to the north. Innis’s northern travels bear this out—he conducted interviews with Hudson’s Bay Company officials and mining engineers, reifying what he already expected to see in the frontier. Liza Piper’s comparative essay on the gender barriers faced by Irene Biss, Innis’s doctoral student, shows how important positionality and privilege were in constructing this northern vision.
There is a wealth of interesting content in this book. All the essays are terse, engaging, and consider new material. However, readers sitting down with this thick volume may not be surprised mid-way to find a recognizable fatigue set in at the prospect of reading yet another essay that begins by retracing Harold Innis’s northern itinerary. This makes the final two chapters of the volume by Shirley Roburn and Peter C. Van Wyck a welcome change. What makes these chapters different is they consider not what the north meant for Innis then, but what Innis means for the north now. Both seem to willfully disobey the rules by delving into Innis’s 1950s texts on media, empire and communications to think about the knowledge economy that structures contemporary relations between north and south. Van Wyck’s chapter (also previously published) considers what insights Innis may have for outsiders who study the north and must learn “how to narrate a place and a time as a stranger” (p. 348). Roburn’s essay considers a similar matter—how Innis’s thought on unconscious biases and knowledge economies may point the way to repealing the uneven geography of communication between the southern Canadian state and northern indigenous communities. Roburn is less concerned with valorizing or critiquing Innis, arguing instead that his greater contribution is not specific to the north, or even Canada: “Innis set an example for academics, encouraging them to be actively involved in shaping the institutional arrangements that define how knowledge is discovered and circulated” (p. 319). It is no small wonder that Innis is such an abiding figure of interest.
We thank Clara Bachmann for assistance in preparing the online version of this article.
We thank S. Goldsborough for assistance in preparing the online version of this article.
Page revised: 29 March 2020
