Indians and Colonists at the Crossroads of Empire

By Timothy J. Shannon

Book Overview

On the eve of the Seven Years' War in North America, the British crown convened the Albany Congress, an Anglo-Iroquois treaty conference, in response to a crisis that threatened imperial expansion. British authorities hoped to address the impending collapse of Indian trade and diplomacy in the northern colonies, a problem exacerbated by uncooperative, resistant colonial governments. In the first book on the subject in more than forty-five years, Timothy J. Shannon definitively rewrites the historical record on the Albany Congress. Challenging the received wisdom that has equated the Congress and the plan of colonial union it produced with the origins of American independence, Shannon demonstrates conclusively the Congress's importance in the wider context of Britain's eighteenth-century Atlantic empire. In the process, the author poses a formidable challenge to the Iroquois Influence Thesis. The Six Nations, he writes, had nothing to do with the drafting of the Albany Plan, which borrowed its model of constitutional union not from the Iroquois but from the colonial delegates' British cousins.Far from serving as a dress rehearsal for the Constitutional Convention, the Albany Congress marked, for colonists and Iroquois alike, a passage from an independent, commercial pattern of intercultural relations to a hierarchical, bureaucratic imperialism wielded by a distant authority.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0801488184
• ISBN13: 9780801488184
• Release Date: November 2002
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.1" x 8.9"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Shannon gets it right

Dr. Shannon has exploded a series of myths in this landmark study. His research is impeccable, his analysis bulletproof, and his writing elegant. Anyone interested in the collapse of the British Empire in North America should read this book and, I daresay, commit major parts of it to memory. You may have seen Dr. Shannon on The History Channel commenting on the authenticity of popular movies like Dances with Wolves and The Patriot. This man is serious, smart, and incisive. Read this book and hope he is working on more.