"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."--BOOK JACKET.

"By tracing the local, provincial, and imperial settings of the Albany Congress, Shannon's book fleshes out the events that shook Britain's rule of North America. 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 controlled by a distant authority."--BOOK JACKET.