Most scholars of Canadian history are familiar with HaroldInnis's (1956:393) maxim, articulated at the end of The FurTrade in Canada that,“the present Dominion emergednot in spite of geography but because of it.?"While thestatement has been derided as a crude form of geographicdeterminism linking river basins to national development,William J. Buxton's new volume,Harold Innis on PeterPond, implores readers to pay closer attention to the nextsentence in Innis's (1956:393) book: "the significance of thefur trade consisted in its determination of the geographicframework".For Buxton, Innis's primary interest was in theway the fur trade economy, as much as the constitutionaldevelopments that led to Confederation, shaped the outlineof the Canadian nation. For those who believe Innis's large-scale economic studies neglected the relationship betweenindividual agency and historical change, Buxton's volumereveals how, for nearly two decades after the release of TheFur Trade in Canada, Innis's fur trade scholarship focusedprimarily on a single person: the explorer Peter Pond.
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