Donald Creighton – författare

Harold Adams Innis died a quarter century ago. At the time of his death in 1952 he was Canada's pre-eminent  scholar in the field of the social sciences. His reputation was based on his monumental contributions to Canadian economic history and the role of the means of communication in shaping history. As so often happens, his ideas were not greatly followed up, except by Marshall McLuhan, for some years after his death, but there is no growing recognition among Canada's scholars of the depth of his perceptions and the fruitfulness of his thought for understanding of Canada's and of world history.A close friend of Innis at the University of Toronto was Donald G. Creighton, who wrote this memoir of his life in the summer of 1953. To this paperback edition of that work, Professor Creighton has added a new introduction on its origins in the university conditions of its time. A personal tribute, the book is written in Creighton's distinctive and elegant style; it is a skilful biography which will serve well to introduce the career, character, and thought of Harold Adams Innis to a new audience.Donald Creighton himself is recognized as one of the outstanding scholars of his time. Like Innis, he has reinterpreted Canadian history in his many books and this finely crafted memoir reveals the gifts of both the biographer and his subject.

Originally published in 1937 as "The Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence, 1760-1850" and re-issued in its present form in 1956, Donald Creighton's study of the St. Lawrence became an essential text in Canadian history courses. This, his first book, helped establish Creighton as the foremost English Canadian historian of his generation. In it, he examines the trading system that developed along the St. Lawrence River and he argues that the exploitation of key staple products by colonial merchants along the St. Lawrence River system was key to Canada's economic and national development. Creighton tells the story of the St. Lawrence empire largely from the perspective of these Canadian merchants, who, above all others, struggled to win the territorial empire of the St. Lawrence and to establish the Canadian commercial state.Christopher H. Moore, historian and Governor General Award winner, has written a new introduction to this classic text.