Customer Reviews

The Comanche Empire (The Lamar Series in Western History)

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is an outstanding scholarly work well deserving of five stars. In some respects I wonder if it could have been written by an American (the author is Finnish) since it sharply contrasts with the politically correct myth of the American Indians, always fighting in defense of their homeland and way of life against the overwhelming encroachments of evil Europeans. Some will use the term "revisionist" to describe this work, but more accurately it should be described simply as Comanche history for two centuries from the Comanche viewpoint. To put the contrast in more familiar terms, until recently almost all books on the World War II Eastern Front between Germany and the Soviet Union have been told from the German side. Now David Glantz and others are writing books that tell the Soviet side. Are they "revisionist?"

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.

First, I would draw your attention to two excellent reviews of this book, one in the May 29, 2008 /NYRB/ by Larry McMurtry and the other in the Dec. 2008 /American Historical Review/ by Gerald Betty. I think McMurtry's review sums it up best: This book contains many valuable insights into Comanche history, particularly during the 18th century, but fails to sustain its central argument that the Comanches were an empire. Hamalainen does not adequately define "empire," which is problematic if one is asserting that the Comanches were one.

Some suggest the assertion that American Indians had power in colonial America is a novel and significant revision. I'm not so sure. Haven't scholars already constructed and dismantled the "imperial" Iroquois? Didn't George Hyde demonstrate half a century ago that the horse prompted a whole new set of power relations on the Plains between not only Indians and Europeans but also initially between different Indian groups? One is left to wonder where to draw the distinction between revision and "reinvention." The question isn't whether Indians had power; it's identifying in what instances they did or did not, and then accounting for the dynamism in power relations. In the end, the enduring persuasiveness I've found in Richard White's /Middle Ground/ and James Brooks' /Captives and Cousins/ is their ability to illustrate a mulivalent world in which power is variable across time and space and its various forms (political, economic, and cultural) aren't always congruent. White and Brooks capture this dynamism and complexity in a manner that recent revisionists such as Hamalainen don't. If power (who has it and who doesn't, etc.) is to be the center of the debate, then scholars need to be more explicit in delineating its various forms and explaining how it works over time.

This is a clearly written and well researched book, but I'm not sure its broad interpretive strokes really are so much innovative as they are fresh. If this topic interest you, I would recommend Gary Anderson's /The Indian Southwest/ and Brian DeLay's excellent if long /War of a Thousand Deserts/.

This well-written and tightly argued work on the Comanche Indians and their relations with the Spanish, French, Americans and with other Native peoples might be called a foreign-policy history of the Comanche empire. The author's long-awaited book details how the Comanche made use of their physical and cultural environment to develop an empire that controlled much of the southern plains, dominated trade within the southern and central Great Plains and Southwest, shaped the development of Spanish and French colonies in the region, and eventually collapsed from internal pressures, environmental difficulties and U.S. military action.
General readers interested in a new way of thinking about the Comanche and the history of the Southwest will enjoy this readable work. Scholars too will find much of use, including copious and meticulous citations and a good index. I highly recommend this work.

When I was growing up in eastern Missouri it was de rigueur that the man-children of the clan become Boy Scouts. Thus, despite little aptitude or interest, I was duly enrolled in the Cub Scouts and spent summer weekends attending den meetings and going on the occasional camping trip. (Don't fear that this diversion is going to descend into horror stories about mental and physical abuse - happily my life as a Scout was quite banal. I never got beyond the Cub stage, truth be told, and my parents were "cool" with that.) I bring this episode in my life up because it was as a Scout that I first encountered the Native American. Admittedly it was a highly white-washed (there's a loaded word!) version that stressed the most admirable aspects of Indian culture (at least "admirable" in Anglo eyes) and ignored the complexities and less savory history of relations between Indians and Europeans (and between Indians and Indians). It also tended to focus exclusively on Plains Indians, blinkering my perception of non-Plains tribes for the longest time. Subsequent reading (remember, I'm not the Grizzly Adams type) led me to other works sympathetic to the Native perspective. In particular I remember a YA biography of the Seminole chieftain Osceola (giving me the animus I bear toward Andrew Jackson to this day). It was a kid's book so the more gruesome details of the war against the Seminoles didn't figure in the narrative but I understood that the white man had been grossly unjust to the Indian. Even my fiction reading favored the Indian (or at least sympathized with their plight). I remember a book about the lost Roanoke colony (they were saved and incorporated into one of the local tribes); and Andre Norton wrote many novels with Native characters (The Sioux Spaceman, among others, and one (title unremembered) where, in an alternate Earth, there's a powerful, modern Iroquois empire). All this prepared me to accept the great myth of our national epic with an appropriately jaundiced eye; all this prepared me to accept this wonderful book about a near-forgotten era in the history of the New World.

Despite a writing style that's sodden with academic jargon (like "fundamentally a study of indigenous agency"), I'm giving this book four stars because of the intense pleasure I felt discovering a world and era I never realized existed and enriching my understanding of my country's history. To be fair, Hamalainen's language becomes less turgid once you get past the first chapter or so (he only relapses in the Conclusion but I'm all for forgiving him). This book is divided into eight chapters that cover an era from about 1700, when the Comanches arrived in the southern Great Plains with their then-allies the Ute, to 1874, when the tribes were finally confined to reservations by the US Army. The author chronicles the Comanches' rise as the dominant power on the plains and their sudden, catastrophic collapse.

Before going on, I wanted to say that one of the strongest overall features of the book is that Hamalainen doesn't ennoble or demonize anyone. The Comanches are not noble-but-doomed indigenes standing up to European imperialism; nor are they mindless savages futilely resisting the advance of modern civilization. They (and the other actors in our drama - Spaniards, Mexicans, Texans, Americans and other Native nations) are just human beings acting like human beings have acted for thousands of years. There are instances of noble and generous behavior just as there are instances of the most savage cruelty. That balance, for me, makes the book all the more convincing.

What follows are brief synopses and impressions gleaned from reading each chapter. If you're interested in Hamalainen's arguments and proofs, read the book yourself :-)

Introduction: If you can hack through the jargon, the Introduction sets up the basic arguments of the book. Thus: (1) The rise of a Comanche hegemony on the southern Great Plains (roughly from the Arkansas river south to the Rio Grande, and stretching c. 200 miles from the eastern face of the Rockies) foiled Spain's (and Mexico's) attempt to create a stable inland empire. (2) Again, we have an examination of a frontier zone as a region of flux and innovation similar to the situation along the Rhine in the Roman histories I've been reading lately. And (3), an examination of the character of Comanche imperialism and an analysis of why it failed in the face of US expansion.

The first five chapters - Conquest, New Order, The Embrace, The Empire of the Plains, Greater Comancheria - document the Comanches' rise from just one of many tribes moving into the area in the 18th century to the zenith of their power in the first half of the 19th.

In the early 1700s, the first tribes that could be called "Comanche" wandered down out of Utah with the Utes, one of the first Native cultures to adopt the horse. "Comanche" is the Spanish form of a Ute word that probably meant "enemy" or "those guys who won't stop attacking us" (I freely paraphrase here as I don't have the reference in front of me but that's the gist). Comanches called themselves numunu, which (as is often the case) simply means "The People" (cf. German deutsche).

Though Spain claimed northern Mexico and the southern Great Plains it could not colonize it nor even properly hold it, and the Comanches moved into the power vacuum. The Apache, the original, dominant power in the territory, were overmatched by the newcomers' command of horses and their more cohesive political organization. This shouldn't suggest that the Comanche had any form of government recognized by Western eyes nor that they had a conscious plan of expansion. To the Spaniards (and their American successors) the Comanche appeared as savage marauders without mercy, appearing out of the plains to murder and ravish. To most of them. Spain was fortunate in mid-century to have a man named Cachupin as the territory's governor. He possessed an understanding of Comanche culture and sensibilities that allowed him to create a modus vivendi that gave the provinces of New Mexico room to prosper in (relative) peace. Not surprisingly, it was rare that a man of Cachupin's quality occupied the post so Spanish/Comanche relations always hovered close to outright hostilities. Even under Cachupin, Hamalainen argues that the Spaniards made a fundamental error in believing that they were in control of the situation. Much like our own politicians in Washington, those in Mexico City and Madrid ignored the reality and the reports of their agents on the ground in preference for a world where their desires and power signified. It made for a delicate balance that only the ablest governors could maintain.

Spanish policy attempted to make the Comanche dependent upon them but the exact opposite occurred - the Spanish colonies became dependent upon the Comanche for their survival. This dependence became so great in New Mexico's case that she had practically severed relations with the Mexican government. Texas' case became so desperate, Mexico invited American colonists into the province.

Internally, Comancheria (the region dominated by the Comanche) could be divided into eastern and western halves, which developed differently and faced different challenges along their borders but which maintained unity via complementary trade and periodic general councils that met to deal with regionwide issues. Below these councils, Comanche political/economic society rested on nomadic rancherias of a few hundred souls (at their largest). Chiefs, called paraibos, ruled by common consent of the adult males. Warriors (sometimes from several rancheria) would organize under warchiefs for raids but such figures only commanded during the raid, they had no authority otherwise (though often paraibos in their own right).

In the 1820s, Spain disappeared as a factor in plains history to be replaced by a newly independent Mexico and a rapidly, aggressively expansionist US. For the moment, though, no one enjoyed an overwhelming advantage. Mexico's position steadily eroded as it proved incapable of creating an effective presence north of the Rio Grande (and only a minimal one south of the river). The US's attention was focused on lands beyond the Rockies - the plains were just a path to the riches of the far West. Without direct interference from the Americans, Comancheria continued to expand and tighten its economic stranglehold over the region. In 1840, no Comanche would have believed that in a little over a generation they would be a broken remnant dependent upon American generosity to survive.

Children of the Sun - the anthropology chapter: And one of the most fascinating. Comanche society was in a constant state of flux, balancing hunting vs. pastoralism, a market vs. a subsistence economy, localism vs. centralization, egalitarianism vs. inequality, the individual vs. the group and slavery vs. assimilation.

Two animals - the horse and the bison - were essential to creating and maintaining Comanche superiority. Hamalainen contends that the Comanche were the only Native culture to wholly devote itself to an equine-based, pastoral lifestyle. In the process, they sacrificed the "gathering" side of their previous hunter-gatherer existence, becoming dependent upon the more sedentary Native and European societies around them for goods (like metal tools and guns) and staple crops. In essence, the Comanches became the New World equivalent of the steppe tribes of Eurasia.

Becoming pure pastoralists brought about a significant change in the division of labor and a deleterious shift in women's status: Boys tended the great horse herds; women maintained the households and provided much of the labor that converted horse and bison products into marketable goods; and men occupied themselves with scouting for pasture, taming feral horses, raiding and commerce (two sides of the same coin in Comanche eyes). Beyond relegating women to servility, the changeover to pastoralism also militarized Comanche society - a man's worth depended upon his prowess in battle and his ability to secure and protect his wealth (i.e., horses). This chapter is all too short and I would have liked more information about Comanche society. Evenso, I haven't touched upon the author's discussion of slavery or the Comanche tradition of individualism and meritocracy that mitigated the strong pressure toward political centralization and economic stratification.

As the final chapters - Hunger and Collapse - show, by the 1830s, the Comanche had created a flourishing and stable polity that preserved much of traditional Comanche culture while accommodating the demands of "empire." But it was supremely vulnerable to the disruption of its foundation - the horse and the bison. Comancheria's tragedy was that its success sealed its doom. Access to the wealth generated by their trade monopolies led to larger populations and pressure to expand. Combined with treaties which allowed outsiders to hunt the bison, the Comanche fatally weakened the herds. A 20+ year drought beginning in 1845 broke the "empire." The only reasons the Comanche didn't succumb until 1874 was that America was distracted in the 1850s and 1860s with the slavery question and the Civil War and the rains returned in the mid-1860s. Comancheria enjoyed an "Indian" summer (sorry, couldn't resist) but when the US government determined to eliminate the Comanche threat, it unleashed a total war against them (tactics perfected in the Civil War); Comancheria proved unable to survive the onslaught.

In a pattern repeated a few years later in the northern Great Plains, the final days of Comanche resistance were dominated by an apocalyptic religious movement that fell apart at the "battle" of Adobe Walls, when its leader (Isatai) fell to US Army-issue bullets. In 1874, all resistance disappeared and the remnants of the Comanche nation were herded into reservations and forced to give up their way of life, enduring second-class status in the triumphant American empire. This last point brings up a characteristic of Comancheria that I neglected to mention earlier: the Comanches' Roman-like capacity to accommodate and assimilate. Like Rome, as long as Comanche partners adopted or accommodated Comanche culture, stable and relatively peaceful relations pertained. A far cry from America's xenophobia. It still smacks of imperialism but of a "gentler" species. (And we shouldn't forget that when neighbors couldn't mesh with the Comanche, they suffered the savage raids the nation was known for.)

In concluding, Hamalainen asks, "Why the Comanches?" and comes up with 5 answers:

1. Geography favored horse breeding and bison hunting, and the Comanches were in the right place at the right time to exploit it.

2. Their timing was also fortunate in that they could play the Europeans off against each other to achieve hegemony.

3. Comanche culture was remarkably flexible and innovative.

4. The horse allowed Comanches to shift wholly to pastoralism, opening routes to wealth and the ability to dominate the trade routes across the plains.

5. Diseases which decimated more sedentary Native tribes had a smaller impact on the dispersed populations of Comancheria, and the Comanche were able to maintain a relatively larger population up through the 1840s.

This is only a snapshot of the wealth of information contained in this volume. Considering the rating I've given Comanche Empire it should come as no surprise that I highly recommend this book to the interested, especially as you don't need a particularly deep background in Southwest American history.

I could not find a good reason to give this book fewer than 5 stars. While it might not be perfect, I am not a historian and might miss some imperfections in it. This is a very comprehensive and well-written history of the Comanche Nation, from its beginnings around 1700 to the end of its life on the plains as a free-ranging tribe of raiders and buffalo hunters. The popular concept of cowboys vs Indians was a very late episode in Comanche history. Most of their history for which we have records are their dealing with the Spaniards and Mexicans. Their dealings with Texans and Americans came near the end. The importance of the horse is stressed by the author. In places it is stressed almost too much, as when we learn, and learn again, that horses on the southern plains survived Winter much better than those of the more northerly tribes. Thus the sheltered river valleys were crucial for food and protection of the huge horse herds that the Comanches maintained. I lost track of how many times that sycamore bark was mentioned as a vital horse fodder in Winter. No mention was made of what Cheyenne and Lakota horses ate in Winter. The famous Comanche chief Quanah Parker is mentioned in passing a couple of times, but we never learn why he was famous. The author never tells, unless that detail is buried in the voluminous notes that accompany the text. I was not aware of the importance of Comanche raids into Mexico as being an important factor for the failure of Mexico to resist the US in the Mexican War of 1846-48. The raids nearly drained northern Mexico of serviceable horses and mules, leaving nags for Mexican military use. By 1874, the Comanche horse culture on the souther plans was over, the bison nearly gone, and Comanche forced onto a reservation. Overall, this was a very interesting book and filled a lots of gaps in my understanding of the Old West.

Bold, agressive, new scholarship that is the sort of real work historians ought to be engaged in. These are not the savages of the early 20th century or the tragic people of the 60s to the 80s - the Comanches of this work are as vivid, human, and powerful as any of the good imperial studies carried out on European, East Asian, or Central Asian civilizations. To call Hammalainen "revisionist" as a slur might be tempting for opponents of his point of view, but for those who understand the quality of this work compared to past discussions of the Comanche, "revisionist" is the greatest compiment it could get. A great effort from a young scholar: I can't wait to see what he produces next.

There is very little to add given all the five and four star reviews. There were a few typos, such as making 1875 the Centennial year of American Independence, and some glaring mistakes. For the record, the U.S. Army was never armed with Winchester repeating rifles. They went from the single shot Model 1866 45-70 cal. trapdoor Springfield, which was the standard long arm of the Indian Wars, to the Krag-Jorgensen rifle in 30-40 calibre in 1892. Thus the Indians usually had the firepower advantage, as at Little Big Horn. That niggling mistake in a field well known to me makes me wonder what other mistakes might be lurking in the book. But, overall, a herculean effort that is well worth the price of the book.

A heck of a great job with tons of information on a fantastic people. I never could of imagined native people playing such a pivotal role in the development of the west and our nation itself. The author is immensenly detailed in his writing his facts are backed up by research and he explores ground uncovered by other writers.
I was particularly intrigued by Comanche trading networks and why it was that they had to trade. Additionally as a people they were extremely accommodating and tolerant of other cultures, traditions and peoples. However, there's no doubt that like any great nation they sought hegemony.
Finally the author does a great service in describing the role the horse played in the development of the native plains cultures and the Comanches pivotal role in dispersing horses further north of the southern plains. Though large the book is very readable, chronologically easy to follow and has some excellent maps and histories of other native peoples as they related to Comanches and Comancheria itself. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the west, native americans and the western history of the U.S.

This well written book is an unusually thoughtful and careful analysis of the role of the Comanche in American history. Based on an exhaustive analysis of primary and secondary sources, Hamalainen presents a novel interpretation that provides a new perspective on the history of the American West. This book is the latest, and one of the best, of a series of generally revisionist monographs establishing the importance of some native American groups (though Hamalainen generally eschews this term and uses the traditional Indian) as independent actors in American history. Francis Jennings' pioneering work on the Iroquois confederation is a notable example.

Hamalainen demonstrates that in the course of the 18th century, the Comanche became on the major political and economic force in the Southern Great Plains and surrounding areas. At its height, the area of Comanche hegemony included much of what is now Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Kansas, with significant influence on surrounding areas. A measure of Comanche success is the fact that for the later 18th and early 19th century, Comanche became the trade lingua franca for much of what is now the American Southwest. Hamalainen's story is very much one of technological and social innovation. He argues well that the Comanche were pioneers of the horse culture of the Great Plains. They were probably the first, and arguably the most successful, of American indigenes to master the horse and move out onto the Great Plains. The Comanches were aided by a major biogeographic advantage. The southern Great Plains have relatively temperate winters, allowing the maintenance of large herds of horses and mules. This led to the development of a hybrid bison hunting and pastoralist society capable of supporting a substantial population. By the mid-18th century, the Comanches were established well on the southern Great Plains and able to gather signficant numbers of mounted warriors to dominate both the Plains and surrounding regions. Hamalainen carefully documents that Comanche society was not a subsistence culture but rather depended crucially on extensive trade with surrounding sedentary socities, both indigenous and Spanish colonial. The Comanche required weapons, metal tools, plant foods, and labor that could only obtain via trade and warfare from surrounding farmers. With their military power, control of trade routes, enormous resources of horses, and privileged access to Bison hunting, the Comanche became the focus of economic exchange across the southern Great Plains.

Hamalainen demonstrates that the Comanche not only were the major economic actor in the Southwest, but also its major political power for much of this period. The 18th and 19th century Comanche appear to be smaller versions of great inner Asian nomadic powers like the Huns or the Mongols. The Comanche turned Spanish New Mexico and Texas into economic dependencies, extracted tribute from the Spanish colony in Mexico, and were overlords of a number of other indigenous peoples. They added a third component to the herding and bison hunting arms of their culture; systematic raiding and slave taking of surrounding sedentary communities. The Comanche prevented the Spanish from populating much of New Mexico and Texas. In the early 19th century, Comanche success drove the Mexican government to open Texas to American immigration, a decision with disatrous consequences for the Mexican state. Comanche raiders devastated northern Mexico in the years prior to the Mexican-American war, greatly weakening Mexican state. One of Hamalainen's themes is that Comanche and American imperialism tended to proceed in inadvertant tandem in diminishing the grip of the Spanish and later Mexican states on the Southwest.

Comanche success contained the seeds of their downfall. They overhunted the bison populations and their horse-mule herds pushed bison off good grazing grounds. In the mid-19th century, a period of drought pushed an already stressed system past the breaking point, and the ecological-economic base of Comanche society collapsed, leading to famine, a population crash, and loss of Comanche power. This occurred as Euro-Americans were expanding into Texas. The weakened Comanches nonetheless made an impressive recovery. The American Civil War and its aftermath, along with the return of adequate rainfall, allowed the Comanche to convert almost entirely to a pastoralist cattle herding society. With the increase in their numbers and numbers of horses, they were able to resume systematic raiding of Texan and Mexican communities. This evoked a brutal American response leading to the destruction of the Comanche nation as a political and economic force.

Since the history of the Comanche has to be reconstructed almost entirely from European accounts and later ethnographic work, much of the narrative and analysis is inferential in nature. Hamalainen succeeds admirably in developing both creditable narrative and insightful analysis. Hamalainen gives the Comanche their due without romanticism. I have only a few minor complaints. As part of his effort to describe the agency and power of the Comanche, he sometimes overemphasizes the relative strength of their major opponent, the Spanish Empire. The Comanche were on the fringe of a relatively weak and bureaucratically clumsy imperial power, and as Hamalainen's own analysis demonstrates, this made a big difference. Hamalainen terms the Comanche polity an Empire and sometimes refers to "Comanche civilization." His use of these terms is understandable but somewhat unconventional and their employment doesn't add much to understanding the interesting Comanche society. Other reviewers who complain about Hamalainen's use of academic jargon have a point, though he is generally a clear and engaging writer, and some of what they refer to as jargon is actually technical language, which is different.

Pekka Hamalainen's book is a remarkable array of not only revisionist history, but also a treasure trove of information and insight into the Comanche Empire, including its social, political, economic and diplomatic structure and initiatives. His arguments are succinctly organized and well-structured. He paints the Comanche Empire (Comancheria) as an imperializing entity. This is opposed to what most historians typically consider a European and American endeavor. The Comanches constructed an imposing and powerful nation, although with rather fluid borders, that defeated both the 17th-18th century Spanish Empire and nascent Mexican regime of the early 18th century in the North American Southwest. They created vast commercial systems, an elaborate war machine and a dynamic and complex society that lasted well over a century (early 1700's to the early 1850's). Hamalainen utilizes the borderland concept and a world systems approach that places the Comanche Empire in an economic system that encompasses interactions with numerous empires along a fluid frontier in which rivalries, markets and ecology play vital roles in the rise and fall of the imperial Comanche Empire.

The Comanches owed their rise to numerous exigencies and geographic circumstances. The introduction of the horse into Southwestern North America by the Spanish in the early 17th century altered native, and specifically, Comanche existence. "The horse represented a new way to tap energy," and it "redefined the realm of the possible" for the southwestern empire (25). Comanches became expert equestrians and horse breeders by the dawn of the 19th century. They utilized the horse for warfare, raiding, and commerce. Comanches utilized their skill to frequently raid Spanish settlements and entrepôs in New Mexico and Texas. The "blending of violence and trade had become commonplace on the New Mexico-Comanche border" by the late 18th century (81). In addition, the Comanches tapped into an extensive slave network, using the men, women and children of various Native American tribes and European colonial settlements for both labor and blackmail for trade.

Moreover, Comanche influence came to dominate New Mexico. Comanches alternated between "raiding and trading" to not only achieve military and economic superiority over New Mexico, but also to establish various diplomatic relationships with both native groups and European colonizers. For example, their early alliance with the Ute Native Americans allowed them to overrun Spanish trading posts as well as locate ecologically beneficial environments for the maintenance of their expanding human and horse populations. Their diplomatic relationships are reminiscent of the Realpolitik techniques of Otto von Bismarck in Germany well over a century and a half later. Comanches maintained alliances until they realized they could overrun their allies and pull them into or extract them from their economic sphere. The Comanches were also able to play European imperialists off on one another in order to benefit from trade.

Additionally, the Comanches utilized "gifting" as a means of coercion to maintain Spanish acquiescence and peaceful co-existence until they were finally able to run the Spanish out of the region by the early 19th century. Furthermore, the Comanches established trade relationships with the French in Louisiana and eventually with the burgeoning American Empire in the early 1800's as a means of weapons procurement and other goods including dyes, clothing and foodstuffs. In addition, as Hamalainen points out, native and Spanish populations had a "deeply conflicted attitude toward the Comanches," despising raids yet enjoying the numerous goods procured by the Comanches from various trading posts and fairs (84).

Hamalainen also does a fine job incorporating Alfred Crosby's analysis of the impact of flora and fauna upon the North American continent. He shows how disease was at times a benefit and a detriment to Comanche imperialization. Small pox epidemics wiped out Comanche populations "in 1799, 1808, 1816, 1839, 1848, and 1851," destabilizing their regime (179). However, such diseases took a toll on other populations as well, including the Wichitas, permitting "the mobile Comanches" to evade the threat while eventually eradicating the Wichata (96). However, such diseases also struck critical food supplies including the bison for which the Comanches were reliant as a predominant food supply. Because the Comanche culture viewed bison as central to their diet, while venison and maize were viewed as secondary or even as emergency foodstuffs, they not only over-hunted the animals, but also felt the effects of severe droughts that wiped out numerous herds by the early to mid 19th century. This element, combined with the rise and expansion of the technologically superior U.S. state, fragmented and eventually destroyed Comanche social, political and market structures.

Hamalainen's book is an amazing array of new findings and interpretations that require much more than a single page analysis. His evaluations of Comanche views toward race as well as Comanche views toward gender are also refreshing. Rarely do we get the opportunity to view a Native American society that was not only an imperialistic power that challenged and usurped European powers, but also a complex governing and commercial entity that inadvertently opened the gateway for American domination of the continent. The Comanches were a dynamic cultural, economic, social, diplomatic and militaristic machine that rivaled and for a time surpassed the empires that historians so often dwell upon as history's greatest powers.