The Crown Colonist

In writing this book, Clark's intention was to educate the British people about Britain's colonies, which were quite numerous at the time of publication. Clark wished to highlight the import role the colonies played in making Britain a world economic power, and to teach readers about the history of the colonies. Newfoundland and Labrador are discussed in chapter two (p. 40-48), with Clark explaining how Newfoundland was the oldest colony, the importance of the rich Newfoundland fishery to Britain, and the French Shore Question. Clark also corrects popular misconceptions about the colony, and provides information about Newfoundland and Labrador's economy, climate, and physical geography.

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.