The political economist Harold Adams Innis (1894-1952) developed the "staple theory" of Canadian development.

Harold Adams Innis was born in 1894 in Oxford County in southwestern Ontario. His parents, who were strict Baptists, owned a moderately prosperous farm. Harold Innis started his schooling in Sunday school and the local one-room public school, moving on to the nearby Otterville High School and then to Woodstock Collegiate Institute.

In 1913 Innis entered McMaster University, at that time a Baptist college located in Toronto. He took his degree in the spring of 1916 and then, 21 years old, like so many of his friends whose lives were to be turned around by the maelstrom of World War I, he enlisted in the army. The appalling experience of the trenches and the mass slaughter of battles such as Vimy Ridge, where he was wounded, had a profound effect on Innis. As a private at the front...