The Comanche Empire (The Lamar Series in Western History) Paperback – May 19, 2009

This book covers some early history of my area - a subject which has always interested me. It's painstakingly researched with copious end notes giving it a sense of credibility often lacking in other historical content I've read. I'll state it plainly - it sets the record straight time after time from what I'd read before. I learned more from this book than likely a half dozen lesser ones.

So as far as content and historical method, this book is an easy 5 stars. It hits the content ball not only out of the ballpark but out of the city and state where the ballpark's located. Where it falls is in its presentation. The writing is lucid with none of the academic passivity such as "It can be shown..." so prevalent in other serious texts.

However, it's as dry a read as I can remember tackling. It flows like a dissertation which will need defending by a committee of faculty. The author also seems aloof to the suffering of those who lived in proximity to these Comanches. The subject of the book was a large dominant tribe of vicious, greedy and vile killers who stole anything they could killing or enslaving. those they stole from. By the time I"d reached the halfway mark in the book, I"d decided the only just fate for this bunch would be extermination. Thus the latter turns of events bringing the empire down didn't bother me in the least.

Books having a high degree of historical accuracy do not need to be such dry, dull reading. See, for example The World Remade: America in World War I which combines technical accuracy due to meticulous research with an entertaining narrative.

In sum, I learned a great deal from this tome, but didn't enjoy the educational process.

Hamalainen's book is the epitome of solid, scholarly history. It is well-researched and packed full of information. It is a complete history of the Comanche from the emergence of the tribe, through its dominance of the southern plains, to its decline in the mid-1800s. It is also dense and possibly too dry and detailed for the general reader. But for those in academia or inclined toward scholarly history, the book is incredibly beneficial.

Hamalainen does an excellent job of tracing the rise of the Comanche to dominance and telling the familiar tale of their adjustment to the horse and its impact on their lifestyle. He also demonstrates that the Comanche had nuanced relationships with other natives, Mexicans, and whites. This is evident in his description of how the Comanche would play cities such as Taos off from the government in Mexico City and Hamalainen makes an interesting argument that devastating Comanche raids helped to separate regions such as New Mexico from the center leading to their complete detachment during the Mexican-American War. This is objective history and Hamalainen makes it clear that the Comanche were not kind to the Apaches, to the towns they raided, and others. By focusing on a Comanche perspective, he makes a contribution to the growing body of work that restores agency to Native Americans and makes them active players on the historical scene. This is important as it eliminates both the savage and the victim as portrayals of natives. Some tribes will come off looking better than others, just like any other group of people. In this sense, Hamalainen is actively contributing to a growing historiography that includes work on the Arkansas region by Kathleen Duval in The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent (Early American Studies), the Ohio Valley and Southeastern tribes in Gregory Dowd's A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745-1815 (The Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science), and others.

I do quibble with Hamalainen's title and the contention that the Comanche had an empire. This is largely because he never defines his terms. What is an empire? Is it only a large amount of territory under the sway of a single people or does it involve what goes on inside of that territory? Is there a specific economic, social, or political construction that is prerequisite for empire? Hämäläinen hints that empire requires political, economic, and cultural control of outsiders, but what about internal political, social, economic, and cultural structures? While the Comanches may have exhibited some of the outward forms of empire, Hämäläinen does not make a convincing case that their internal systems reflected the sort of political centralization and social hierarchy, among other things, that are typically associated with definitions of empire. Hämäläinen states that the "Comanches never developed a unitary, statelike decision-making system." (p. 269) Can an empire exist without such? If Hämäläinen were to re-define our common conceptions of empire, more needed to be done here.

Ultimately, the Comanche would succumb both to their own success (depletion of resources) and to the burgeoning power of the U.S. Hamalainen adds to a developing scholarship which makes it clear that the Confederacy's loss in the War Between the States was a disaster for Native Americans. The only alternative to the behemoth growing to their east was vanquished, leaving them as the next target and with no strong power to play off against the U.S., or to use as a buffer or ally. Like the other Trans-Mississippi tribes, the Comanche were defeated in the latter half of the 19th century.

Overall, Hamalainen's book is a detailed and important study of the Comanche which adds to our knowledge of the tribe. It is dense and somewhat dry, but it remains largely objective, is fairly well-written, and is certainly well-researched. I look forward to reading T.R. Fehrenbach's Comanches: The History of a People for a counterpoint.

This is an incredible book. It has completely reshaped the conventional wisdom of the Comanche nation and their role in the American southwest. The central premise of the book is that the Comanche were not the disjointed, reactionary, and simple society American settler's thought them to be. They were not nomadic barbarians driven only by greed and violence. They were in fact a complex empire that dominated the southwest for at least a century.

Hamalainen traces the origins of the Comanche nation and their rise as an economic power. The bison was central to Comanche life, and was even more so after their adoption of the horse. The bison dictated everything the Comanche did, forcing them to remain nomadic. But they became the best bison hunters on the continent and developed a monopoly over trade in bison goods. Trade was essential for them because they did not grow crops and thus had to use trade to diversify their diet. But they also raided, which made them a threat to their neighbors. Violent raids were carried out against other native tribes, the Spanish, Mexicans, and Americans. Hamalainen also demonstrates that as these neighboring civilizations gave gifts to the Comanche to maintain good relations, they had effectively become tributary states of the Comanche empire. All trade an interaction was done on the terms of the Comanche, not those of the Spanish, Americans, or anyone else.

Some have pointed out that Hamalainen fails to define "empire" in his book. This is true, and a glaring oversight. However, most standard definitions of empire support his thesis. A standard litmus test, the Conrad-Demarest model of empire, also helps to verify that the Comanche were, without question, a powerful empire. Their collapse came largely from a decade of drought, disease, and the collapse of bison herds. Perhaps their collapse was inevitable in any case, but all of this fits into the standard characteristics of what an empire is.

This book may be daunting for the average reader (it is quite academic), but for those interested, it is well worth it.