Over the three decades of teaching and research allotted Harold Innis, no subject concerned him more than, the state of economics. He looked to economic history to enrich and broaden economic thought, and he sought to explain fashions in economics and to make economists intelligible to themselves. Although Veblen's influence left its mark on his work, Innis remained throughout a disciple of Adam Smith and no name appears more frequently in his observations on economics past and present. His plea was, as he put it, for “a general emphasis on a universal approach” and in his unfinished paper he writes, “The economic historian must test the tools of economic analysis by applying them to a broad canvas and by suggesting their possibilities and limitations when applied to other language or cultural groups.”Apart from this search for perspective in economic thought there were other elements of continuity in Innis's thinking which give his life's work a coherence and a unity whether his interest centred on Canadian economic history or the duration powers of empires. It is scarcely necessary here to refer to his dislike of concentrations of power in any form or to his uncompromising belief in the free and creative powers of the individual, attitudes which stamp his research from beginning to untimely end. In his writings on economic history, technological change, free or controlled, links past and present. In his more specific references to economics, the pricing system provides the key to his reflections on the state of the subject. Early in his work there is present the same price-technology dichotomy that is to be found throughout Veblen's writings; later Innis sought to resolve this dichotomy in his studies of communication in which he saw technology and pricing as elements interacting with politics, law, and religion in a larger network of human relationships.