Empire and Communications

Harold Innis's highly condensed prose style, which frequently ranges over many centuries and several key ideas in one or two sentences, can make his writing in Empire and Communications difficult to understand.

"With the dominance of arithmetic and the decimal system, dependent apparently on the number of fingers or toes, modern students have accepted the linear measure of time," he writes.

[11] Innis writes that the Nile therefore, "acted as a principle of order and centralization, necessitated collective work, created solidarity, imposed organizations on the people, and cemented them in a society.

[13] However, in Empire and Communications, Innis extends his economic analysis to explore the influence of the Nile on religion, associating the river with the sun god Ra, creator of the universe.

In a series of intellectual leaps, Innis asserts that Ra's power was vested in an absolute monarch whose political authority was reinforced by specialized astronomical knowledge.

[19] Innis writes that the military organization that expelled the Hyksos enabled the Egyptians to establish and expand an empire that included Syria and Palestine, and that eventually reached the Euphrates.

[24] Along the way, Innis comments on many aspects of the ancient Middle Eastern empires including power struggles between priests and kings, the evolution of military technologies and the development of the Hebrew Bible.

In Egypt, the Nile's papyrus became a medium for writing while in Mesopotamia, the rivers yielded the alluvial sediments the Sumerians used to fashion the clay tablets on which they inscribed their wedge-shaped, cuneiform script.

[33] Thus, the Phoenician alphabet, a radically simplified writing system, undermined the elaborate hieroglyphic and cuneiform scripts overseen by priestly elites in Egypt and Babylonia.

[36] He suggests that improved communication, made possible by the alphabet, enabled the Assyrians and the Persians to administer large empires in which trading cities helped offset concentrations of power in political and religious organizations.

"The monarch was typically a war leader whose grasp of the concept of space allowed him to expand his territory," Watson writes, "incorporating even the most highly articulated theocracies.

"[43] Innis argues that the Greeks struck a different balance, one based on "the freshness and elasticity of an oral tradition" that left its stamp on Western poetry, drama, sculpture, architecture, philosophy, science and mathematics.

[51] Innis notes that the early Mycenaean Greeks of the Bronze Age developed their own styles of communication because they escaped the cultural influence of the Minoans they had conquered on the island of Crete.

"[54] The classics professor, Eric Havelock, whose work influenced Innis, makes a similar point when he argues that this alphabet enabled the Greeks to record their oral literary tradition with a "wealth of detail and depth of psychological feeling" absent in other Near Eastern civilizations with more limited writing systems.

"The Greeks had no Bible with a sacred literature attempting to give reasons and coherence to the scheme of things, making dogmatic assertions and strangling science in infancy.

At the same time, Rome pursued military expansion in the eastern Mediterranean eventually conquering Macedonia and Greece as well as extending Roman rule to Pergamum in modern-day Turkey.

Innis interrupts his account of Roman military expansion to discuss earlier problems that had arisen from the Greek conquests undertaken by Philip of Macedon and his son, Alexander the Great.

Innis concludes that monarchies that lack the binding powers of nationality and religion and that depend on force were inherently insecure, unable to resolve dynastic problems.

[79] Innis discusses various aspects of Ptolemaic rule over Egypt including the founding of the ancient library and university at Alexandria made possible by access to abundant supplies of papyrus.

"[80] He points out that the power of the written tradition in library and university gave rise to specialists, not poets and scholars — drudges who corrected proofs and those who indulged in the mania of book collecting.

Innis concludes that the increasing emphasis on writing also created divisions among Athens, Alexandria and Pergamum weakening science and philosophy and opening "the way to religions from the East and force from Rome in the West.

"The plunder from the provinces provided the funds for that orgy of corrupt and selfish wealth which was to consume the Republic in revolution," writes Will Durant in his series of volumes called The Story of Civilization.

[89] Innis mentions that the large-scale farms owned by aristocrats brought protests presumably from small farmers forced off the land and into the cities as part of a growing urban proletariat.

Papyrus facilitated the spread of writing which in turn, permitted the growth of bureaucratic administration needed to govern territories that would eventually stretch from Britain to Mesopotamia.

"[97] Innis argues that the gradual rise of Christianity from its origins as a Jewish sect among lower social strata on the margins of empire was propelled by the development of the parchment codex, a much more convenient medium than cumbersome papyrus rolls.

[98] Constantine ended official persecution of Christianity and moved the imperial capital to Constantinople eventually creating a religious split between the declining Western Roman Empire and believers in the East.

"A monopoly of knowledge based on parchment," Innis writes, "invited competition from a new medium such as paper which emphasized the significance of space as reflected in the growth of nationalist monarchies.

"[108] Innis notes that the expense of producing hand-copied, manuscript Bibles on parchment invited lower-cost competition, especially in countries where the copyists' guild did not hold a strong monopoly.

[111] Monopolies of knowledge had developed and declined partly in relation to the medium of communication on which they were built, and tended to alternate as they emphasized religion, decentralization and time; or force, centralization, and space.

The ability to develop a system of government in which the bias of communication can be checked and an appraisal of the significance of space and time can be reached remains a problem of empire and of the Western world.