Why read The Comanche Empire?

Book cover of The Comanche Empire

Book description

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, at the high tide of imperial struggles in North America, an indigenous 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…

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Native American history

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Why read it?

2 authors picked The Comanche Empire as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Mark Dizon

Author

The Comanche Empire turns imperial history on its head. I like how Hämäläinen puts the spotlight on Comanche Indians instead of European colonizers. Indigenous people were powerful empire builders too.

I love how the book is also a story of horses, bison and how Indigenous people harnessed the resources of their environment. Horse riding and bison hunting, as much as Indigenous adaptability, were the foundation of the Comanche Empire.

From Mark's list on The best books on borderland mobility.

Andrew Lipman

Author

When I started graduate school in the mid-2000s, there were only a few Native powers that scholars considered empires—primarily the Aztecs, Mayas, and Incas.

But in 2008, along came the Finnish historian Pekka Hämäläinen with the stunning thesis that the Comanche confederacy became a horseback empire on the southern Plains that flourished from ca. 1720 to 1848. In his telling, the Comaches were an expansive polity that thrived through raiding other Natives and colonial outposts, and by trafficking in bison robes, captives, guns, food, and other trade goods.

Not every reader will be convinced by the “empire” argument, but none…

From Andrew's list on The best books about the rise and fall of empires in North America.