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The reading of Comanche Empire by Pekka Hämäläinen brought up several interesting factors. First, is the idea of what an “empire” is. Empire usually does not describe spaces controlled by Native people. However, Hämäläinen describes the Comanches with imperial characteristics, such as economics, politics, and cultural dimensions. He continues the use of empire to show spatial organization. Hämäläinen helps us to rethink the spatial organization that shaped and were produced by the interactions between the Comanches, the Spanish, Americans, French, Mexicans, and other Native peoples on the Great Plains. Hämäläinen challenges the assumptions about how Native polities and imperial powers though about territorial claims and how they employed more nuanced spatial strategies to assert their cultural influence, authority, and control resources and trade in the Southwest during the eighteenth and nineteenth century.
The readings for one of my comprehensive exams led me to the next intriguing factor about the book. That concept is the relationship between discourse and reality and how those two influence each other (John A. Lynn, Battle: A History of Combat and Culture). Battle does focus on war, but the theoretical approach is derived from cultural history. Hämäläinen starts Comanche Empire of with how other tribes displaced and essentially forced the Comanches out of their traditional homelands. While hardships such as these would demoralize a people, the Comanches did not allow their discourse to shape their reality, instead they allowed there reality to mold their discourse. When the Comanches came into their new lands, the reality they encountered forced them into different habits. The constant confrontation with the Spanish forced them to adopt new ways of war. The book uses the example of how their incorporated guns from the French. However, another aspect that led the dominance of the Comanches in the Southwest was the inability by the Spanish to adopt to their reality. Perhaps this had something to do with how the Spanish perceived themselves in the Americas. Hundreds of years before they destroyed the great empires of the Aztec and the Inca with small expeditionary forces. Or that their mindset was so Eurocentric that they did not believe that the Comanches could be any sort of a threat. When something failed against the Comanches, they continued that same action that failed.
Comanche Empire challenges the preconceived notion of European and Euro-America dominance in the American Southwest in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The book reads wonderfully and shows that it is much more than a tribal history. Hämäläinen boldly shows that the Comanches created a “Comanche” empire that challenged imperial powers at the time and dominated the southern plains for decades.