Harold A. Innis taught political economy at the University of Toronto for more than 30 years. He became internationally famous and published a number of influential books. Innis died in 1952.

It's been said that without Harold A. Innis there could have been no Marshall McLuhan. Empire and Communications is one of Innis's most important contributions to the debate about how media influence the development of consciousness and societies. In this seminal text, he traces humanity's movement from the oral tradition of preliterate cultures to the electronic media of recent times. Along the way, he presents his own influential concepts of oral communication, time and space bias, and monopolies of knowledge.