A reasonable answer to this question could be as follows:
Before the French Indian War, he (Benjamin Franklin) wrote important tracts regarding the colonization of new territories and the expansion of the colonies.
This answer contains two basic elements inferred from the sentence: first, the idea that describes the correspondence between the historical context and the relevance of the tracts; and second, the general intention of those tracts: to suggest what the future of the expansion and colonies might have been.
