The History of the Five Indian Nations Depending on the Province of New-York in America: A Critical Edition

In their new edition of Cadwallader Colden’s History of the Five Indian Nations, John M. Dixon and Karim M. Tiro have applied fresh interpretation and framing from recent British imperial and Iroquoian scholarship to a classic source for Euro-Indian affairs in colonial North America, the first time such a collation has been attempted since 1958. The History is well known both as a secondary source, offering a historical narrative of the seventeenth-century conflicts between the Iroquois, British, French, and French-allied Algonquians and Wyandots, and as a primary source, readable as the enlightened project of an eighteenth-century British administrator. Dixon and Tiro’s version of the History combines the entire first edition, published in 1727 (“Part I”), with an additional thirteen chapters (“Part II”) and new introduction (“Appendix”) published by Colden in 1747. The main text is introduced by the editors in two essays that situate the History within its contemporary...