| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Timothy J. Shannon. Indians and Colonists at the Crossroads of Empire: The Albany Congress of 1754. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. New York State Historical Association, Cooperstown. 2000. Pp. xv, 268. $39.95.

In 1754, an ethnically Dutch community not far from New York's contested border with New France hosted British metropolitan observers, colonial delegates, and Mohawk diplomats meeting in treaty. Later the colonial participants drew up the famous and failed Albany Plan of Union. If ever there was a colonial moment, rich with ethnicity and potential, this was it, and Timothy J. Shannon's splendidly energetic history of the event deftly grasps it for us. Shannon joins other new imperial historians—among them Fred Anderson, Eric Hinderaker, J. Russell Snapp, and Ian K. Steele—who attend carefully to the views, voices, and behavior of the Indians, imperialists, and colonists who helped to shape the late colonial world. 1

Shannon dispenses with the idea that the Albany Congress was about "the founding" in any direct way. Shannon instead treats the Albany meetings in the context of the empire as the participants then imagined it. Where other works on the empire in the 1750s and 1760s investigate the trouble relations between colonists and the rising British state, Shannon takes equally seriously the concerns of British and colonial authorities as they tried to make sense of the status of Indians. He knows that the Indians' perceptions also mattered; indeed, it was the Mohawks' 1753 decision to break their "Covenant Chain," their formal relationship with the colony of New York, that threatened colonial security and led directly to the Albany Congress. . . .

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