Grant on Innis and Cochrane

In a conversation originally included1 in George Grant in Process: Essays and Conversations (ed Lawrence Schmidt, 1978), Grant recorded the following interesting tidbit about Harold Innis’ relation with Charles Cochrane:

The person who educated Innis in his later life was Cochrane, because they went for walks around the University of Toronto. He helped Innis move beyond the fur trade, etc., into deeper subjects. (61)

Innis thanked Cochrane along with Cochrane’s colleague in the classics department, E.T. Owen,  in the ‘Preface’ to his 1950 Empire and Communications.  Cochrane had died in 1945 and Owen in 1948.

  1. Now also in Grant’s Collected Works, v4