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The Comanche Empire (The Lamar Series in Western History) Kindle Edition
A groundbreaking history of the rise and decline of the vast and imposing Native American empire.
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a Native American empire rose to dominate the fiercely contested lands of the American Southwest, the southern Great Plains, and northern Mexico. This powerful empire, built by the Comanche Indians, eclipsed its various European rivals in military prowess, political prestige, economic power, commercial reach, and cultural influence. Yet, until now, the Comanche empire has gone unrecognized in American history.
This compelling and original book uncovers the lost story of the Comanches. It is a story that challenges the idea of indigenous peoples as victims of European expansion and offers a new model for the history of colonial expansion, colonial frontiers, and Native-European relations in North America and elsewhere. Pekka Hämäläinen shows in vivid detail how the Comanches built their unique empire and resisted European colonization, and why they fell to defeat in 1875. With extensive knowledge and deep insight, the author brings into clear relief the Comanches’ remarkable impact on the trajectory of history.
2009 Winner of the Bancroft Prize in American History
“Cutting-edge revisionist western history…. Immensely informative, particularly about activities in the eighteenth century.”—Larry McMurtry, The New York Review of Books
“Exhilarating…a pleasure to read…. It is a nuanced account of the complex social, cultural, and biological interactions that the acquisition of the horse unleashed in North America, and a brilliant analysis of a Comanche social formation that dominated the Southern Plains.”—Richard White, author of The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherYale University Press
- Publication dateOctober 1, 2008
- File size3892 KB
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- The Comanches, then, were an imperial power with a difference: their aim was not to conquer and colonize, but to coexist, control, and exploit.Highlighted by 371 Kindle readers
- Ultimately, the rise of the Comanche empire helps explain why Mexico’s Far North is today the American Southwest.Highlighted by 300 Kindle readers
- Preferring informal rule over formal institutions for both cultural and strategic reasons, Comanches nevertheless created a deeply hierarchical and integrated intersocietal order that was unmistakably imperial in shape, scope, and substance.Highlighted by 248 Kindle readers
Editorial Reviews
From Booklist
Review
“Hämäläinen succeeds in introducing a new perspective on Southwestern history, mastering Spanish and Mexican historic resources to tell of a horse- and bison-based Comanche empire, Comanchería. . . . Enthusiastically recommended for academic and public libraries.”—Library Journal
“Perhaps we can simply stipulate that The Comanche Empire is an exceptional book—in fact, one of the finest pieces of scholarship that I have read in years. . . . Hämäläinen has given us a closely argued, finely wrought, intensely challenging book.”—Joshua Piker, William and Mary Quarterly
“This comprehensive history of the Comanche people treats them as an independent power rather than as victims of American westward expansion. And though Hämäläinen frames his arguments within scholars’ debates on proper perspectives toward the Comanche, general readers interested in the history of the Southwest will discover his to be a fascinatingly informative volume in its explanatory and narrative modes. . . . A valuable library resource for its subject.”—Booklist
“Cutting-edge revisionist western history. . . . Immensely informative, particularly about activities in the eighteenth century.”—Larry McMurtry, New York Review of Books
“The Comanche Empire is a hugely important documentary survey of the Comanche Nation, as known from documentary sources between the late 17th and the late 19th centuries. . . . By removing the anthropology, material culture, and social history from this study of the Comanche, the author finds room to plunge deeply into the political archives of the time and tell the reader how Comancheria functioned as the midcontinental power brokers of the 1700s and 1800s.”—Ed Baker, Austin Chronicle
“[A] fascinating and richly detailed study.”—Si Dunn, Dallas Morning News
“A fascinating new book details [the Comanches’] unusual and colorful history. . . . Hämäläinen writes well and his narrative has an infectious verve and flow. . . . His broad themes are never in doubt, and the evidence he marshals is both compelling and convincing. He has rescued the Comanches from myth and distortion and given them their due in the sprawling epic that is our American story.”—John Sledge, Mobile Press-Register (AL)
“The Comanche Empire is a hugely important documentary survey of the Comanche Nation, as known from documentary sources between the late seventeenth and the late nineteenth centuries.”—Ed Baker, Austin Chronicle
“Comanche Empire is an impressive, well-written, and important study that should significantly influence future metanarratives, whether they include all or parts of Texas, the West, the Borderlands, or even general histories of the United States and Mexico.”—Ty Cashion, Journal of Military History
“Hämäläinen’s treatment of the complex relationships between the Comanches and other European and Native American societies is unique. . . . Hämäläinen collates and narrates the events of the eastern and western frontiers through time in such an effective manner that the reader is swept in the flow of an almost seamless narrative.”—Mariah F. Wade, Great Plains Quarterly
“The Comanche Empire is the best book anyone has written about the Comanche Indians of the southern plains. For many readers, it will be an eye-opener because of its vigorously advanced argument that for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Comanches created a mid-continental empire that controlled the economy of a huge part of the West, turned the northern Spanish and Mexican territories into its colonial appendages, and dominated the geopolitics of the both the Republic of Texas and, for a time, the United States in their imperial designs on the Southwest. If you are unused to thinking of American Indians as having this kind of agency in western history, The Comanche Empire will rearrange the furniture in your head.”—Dan Flores, Montana: The Magazine of Western History
“The Comanche Empire connects ‘the West,’ understood by American historians to mean the trans-Mississippi Western United States, with ‘the West’ as understood by world historians, through the materialist lens of world systems theory. What emerges is formerly unthinkable: a world of ‘reversed colonialism’ in which the Comanche consciously created a functional empire by exploiting and controlling a huge geographic area and the several Euroamerican states that contested for it. . . . The construction and maintenance of this empire by the Comanche and their sometimes surprising allies, and its Carthaginian destruction by the massed might of US forces, form a grand narrative, convincingly told.”—John Harley Gow, Canadian Journal of History/Annales canadiennes d’histoire
“The Comanche Empire offers an acute analysis of the rise of the Comanche power.”—Jeffrey Ostler, Western Historical Quarterly
“This book deserves all the accolades it has and will receive. It is certain to be on reading lists for years to come.”—William J. Bauer, Jr., Journal of World History
“Argued with a drama befitting the subject, The Comanche Empire is bound to influence thinking about western history considerably.”—Daniel J. Gelo, Journal of American History
“An important read for any researcher interested in Indigenous North America, the West, or colonization.”—James O’Neill Spady, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History
“Exhaustively researched and beautifully written, The Comanche Empire is much more than a tribal history of an important Plains Indian people. Hämäläinen’s bold interpretation that the Comanches created a uniquely ‘Comanche’ empire that challenged and subsequently dominated the southern plains for over a century forces a complete reevaluation of the various storms that brewed in the colonial Southwest.”—Thomas A. Britten, Historian
“The Comanche Empire offers the most radical version of Native sovereignty and agency in its widely noted formulation of an Indigenous imperialism. . . . Throughout the book, Hämäläinen is dedicated in his rich historical narrative.”—René Dietrich, American Studies
Winner of the 2010 John C. Ewers Book Award given by the Western History Association
Winner of the 2009 Award of Merit, sponsored by the Philosophical Society of Texas
Co-Silver medal winner of the 2009 Independent Publisher Book Award in the category of History
Received Honorable Mention for the 2008 PROSE Award in the U.S. History and Biography/Autobiography category, sponsored by the Association of American Publishers
Gold medal winner of the 2008 Book of the Year Award in the category of History, presented by ForeWord magazine
“The Comanche Empire is a landmark study that will make readers see the history of southwestern America in an entirely new way.”—David J. Weber, author of Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment
“This exhilarating book is not just a pleasure to read; important and challenging ideas circulate through it and compel attention. It is a nuanced account of the complex social, cultural, and biological interactions that the acquisition of the horse unleashed in North America, and a brilliant analysis of a Comanche social formation that dominated the Southern Plains. Parts of the book will be controversial, but the book as a whole is a tour de force.”—Richard White, author of The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815
“The Comanche Empire is an impressive achievement. That a major Native power emerged and dominated the interior of the continent compels a rethinking of well-worn narratives about colonial America and westward expansion, about the relative power of European and Native societies, and about the directions of change. The book makes a major contribution to Native American history and challenges our understanding of the ways in which American history unfolded.”—Colin G. Calloway, author of One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West before Lewis and Clark
“Hämäläinen not only puts Native Americans back into the story but also gives them—particularly the Comanche—recognition as major historical players who shaped events and outcomes.”—Sherry Smith, Southern Methodist University, author of Reimagining Indians: Native Americans Through Anglo Eyes, 1880–1940
“Pekka Hämäläinen profoundly alters our understanding of the American Southwest, asserting that Comanche expansion and domination eclipsed European imperialism over the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Readers of this ambitious and discerning ethnohistory learn close-up how the Comanches made colonial as well as native communities the building blocks of their own ascendancy. In a counter-narrative to frontier history and a revision of borderlands study, Hämäläinen features the contingency of historical change and the agency of Indian people.”—Daniel H. Usner, Vanderbilt University
About the Author
Product details
- ASIN : B001HZZ05C
- Publisher : Yale University Press; 1st edition (October 1, 2008)
- Publication date : October 1, 2008
- Language : English
- File size : 3892 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 510 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #184,795 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #34 in Native American Studies
- #59 in Native American History (Kindle Store)
- #217 in Native American Demographic Studies
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The author traces the Comanches from origins among the Shoshones, moving through Colorado and becoming allied with the Utes (other authors describe the Comanches as being forced out into the Great Plains by the Utes), acquiring horses and guns from Mexican traders, then spreading into Northern Texas and surrounding country. There they established a virtual "empire", or more accurately, a sphere of hegemony and influence, that extended into six US states and several states in Northern Mexico by 1840. This can be considered as a region controlled loosely by semi-nomads who would eventually face the problem of maintaining their "empire" through population growth in permanent settlements. (The reader should look for parallels to the Golden Horde on the plains of Southern Russia.) The Comanches did not always exterminate all other people in their sphere of influence, but rather used them for trade, a source of slaves, and goods acquired through war and negotiation.
The Comanche collapse came swiftly through a combination of factors, notably drought, disease, and the decimation of the Bison herds through natural causes and over-hunting. By the time they faced serious opposition from Americans (Texans), they were already in steep decline. But until 1840, Comancheria was ruled by the Comanches, taking what they wanted from people on their borders, whether Anglos, Mexicans, or other Indians.
The Comanches were not a benign people, frequently murdering, raping, and enslaving those who opposed them or simply had nothing else of use for the warriors to take. The author describes their society extremely well (much like the Apaches except for the roles of the horse and bison.) Their warrior society was able to undertake raids over 1,000 miles from the heart of Comancheria into Mexico, and even the Lipan Apaches were forced to migrate to escape annihilation. The author points out that the Comanches were fortunate in their timing in that they were able to build their empire in an area not particularly coveted by the Mexicans or Americans until a hundred years later. But his model of an expansionist Indian nation is in direct opposition to the paternalistic tomes normally emanating from academia, although it also fits to a large degree with the history of other aggressive tribes such as the Aztecs, Pohatans, Iroquois and Sioux (Lakota.)
This work is an easy read and stuffed full of facts not normally found in books on the Comanches, or for that matter, on any Indian tribe. All to often, the Indians are simply the enemy and described from the viewpoint of the settler or Army officer, or if the work is coming from academia, it's a discourse on victimhood and how the Indians were mistreated, cheated, and faced with genocide. This book shows them to be real human beings, warts and all, aggressive and defensive, merciful and cruel. There is much to learn here, and if the reader re-assesses his opinions and attitudes towards American Indians as a result, it is all to the good.
If the reader is interested in American history, buy and read this book. Its importance goes far beyond the Comanches.
A less-than-brief review by Frank McLynn in the Literary Review (it escapes me why the LR would ask a Brit to review a book by a Finn on America -- although he did write Villa & Zapate and Wagons West) (Google "Frank McLynn on the Commanche Empire) will give you a pretty good idea of the book's detail content, but be forewarned that some of McLynn's comments are wrong. The Comanches did not war against the Fox Indians and McLynn apparently does not understand the author's math in regards to the bison herd. 6.5 bison per person per year yields 260,000 animals taken if the Comanche and allied population is 40,000, not 20,000. His remarks about the required academic jargon for peer acceptance are correct however -- the author should have avoided the garbage so loved in the ivory towers in a book slated for wide dissemination. For me, the appearance of academic jargon at various times was this book's only flaw.
As grand and impressive as Comancheria was in Hamalainen's description, he did not convincingly argue for his definition of empire.Comanches did not rule vast areas in the name of an emperor or philosophy, nor did they rule the large population usually associated with empire. The Comanche empire was only international in the sense that European colonial powers came to them and were resisted and bettered. Comanches did not meet a sovereign, distant, power on its turf and conquer them. Comanches did not aggressively expand internationally beyond their nation's sphere based on trade and exploitation. Instead they grew internally and were a hegemonic power within a limited geographic territory. As such, they traded their goods, which in some cases reached distant shores, but their ideas stayed mostly in their homeland.
Whether imperial or not, Hamalainen does show that the Comanches earned a place in history as a great power. One thing that made them such was their use of technology. They were quick to pick up on horsemanship from their allies the Utes and raise it to a high level. Comanche use of horses allowed them to improve their modes of transportation, hunting, and warfare. Comanches ultimately developed sophisticated ways of breeding horses that increased their size, endurance, and speed. After only becoming equestrians in the early eighteenth century, Comanche's developed horses that were considered superior to Spanish or Mexican stock by the early nineteenth century. Comanches eventually expanded their husbandry to include mules. Comanches were also quick to adopt the use of metals. Iron, particularly, was put to immediate use upon its introduction. Items derived from iron made hunting and daily chores more efficient. Hamalainen posits that Comanches advanced themselves further by producing knives, awls, needles, and pots which were more durable and effective than what they were using. Most importantly, firearms were quickly adapted, and with their mastery of horsemanship, the Comanches carved a dominant place for themselves on the Plains.
Slavery also played a large role in fueling the rise of the Comanches, which they used in two ways to further their power. Their primary use of slaves was in trade. Frequent raids by Comanche warriors garnered a large supply of captives taken from other tribes, Mexican settlements and some whites (mostly women and children). Those captured were then employed to enrich Comanche coffers. Second, they used slaves to assist with mundane chores, and eventually labor intensive jobs, around camp. Through the acquisition and sale of slaves, Comanches became a large player in the burgeoning plains economy. The use of slave labor allowed Comanches to continue to expand their lifestyle and become more pastoral which, in turn, allowed them to produce many crops and other goods like blankets, beads, and metal products for barter and trade.
Of course the growing Comanche presence and participation in market economy, from its inception, was an increasing concern to Spanish New Mexico. Far from colonizing the region, Spanish authorities were engulfed by the Comanches, whose power induced other settlers and subjects to defy Spanish authorities. The Spaniards reacted by attempting to engage the Comanches in unilateral treaties. A 1762 treaty would have subjugated Comanches to the Spanish crown by restricting Comanche alliances to Spanish New Mexico. Comanches rejected this effort to limit their autonomy and instead expanded their trade network and ultimately went to war to secure avenues of commerce in New Mexico. Wars carried on into the 1780's and all subsequent efforts by the Spanish at imperial conquest descended into futility. Hamalainen claims that Spanish efforts failed because they interpreted their deals with Comanches as edicts to a subject people, and Comanches assumed a posture of negotiating with brothers as equals.
It was this lack of understanding of the politics of the area that loosened Spain's grip on the region, and paved the way for American expansion. By the early nineteenth century Americans began moving into the Great Plains. Hamalainen wrote that the American and Comanche empires `co-evolved'. American interests and those of the Comanches did not collide like those of the Spaniards (and eventually Mexicans) and Comanches. Americans sought title to the land as they passed through on their continuation to the Pacific. Comanches sought control of the land which Americans, for a time, had little problem granting. Americans developed trade practices with Comanches that differed from Spanish New Mexico's that aligned the two groups more on familial bonds. American traders spent long periods with the Comanches, until their goods were exhausted. Spaniards traded at fairs for a prescribed period of time leaving when that time was expired. Thus, Americans were better able to develop `kin' relationships which were very important in dealing with the Comanche's.
All of this adds up to a pseudo-empire at best, despite Hamalainen's attempt to broaden the term. In time, American expansionism would engulf the Comanches. Eventually, the thinning of bison herds, related climatic developments,and tribal depletion due to disease forced the Comanches into smaller and smaller units which broke down their cohesion, and saw their trade inroads crumble. It became a matter of mere survival, and no longer domination of the plains that permeated Comanche life. In conclusion, it was remarkable how quickly Comanche culture collapsed. What had been building for over a century and a half dissolved in the space of little more than a decade. American technology outdistanced that of the Comanches, and the Americans far outnumbered the Comanches. Americans arrived in waves, far too much for the weakened Comanches to successfully resist. Their land, way of life, and their empire, if there ever really was one,vanished.