SOURCE: "Innis and Economics," in Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, Vol. XIX, No. 3, August, 1953, pp. 291-303.

In the following essay, Easterbrook delineates phases of Innis's career as a writer on economics.

Over the three decades of teaching and research allotted Harold Innis, no subject concerned him more than the state of economics. He looked to economic history to enrich and broaden economic thought, and he sought to explain fashions in economics and to make economists intelligible to themselves. Although Veblen's influence left its mark on his work, Innis remained throughout a disciple of Adam Smith and no name appears more frequently in his observations on economics past and present. His plea was, as he put it, for "a general emphasis on a universal approach" and in his unfinished paper he writes, "The economic historian must test the tools of economic analysis by applying them to a...