Histories of Order and Empire

This is, at first glance, an odd pairing of books. One covers several centuries of Comanche history on the southern plains and the other focuses on the post-Revolution Ohio Valley. Pekka Hämäläinen explores a variety of anthropological and ethnohistorical sources to produce a wide-ranging analysis of Comanche internal and external life. David Andrew Nichols surveys the writings and records of citizens and politicians to bring more attention to the connections between national politics and local power struggles in the early American republic. Despite these apparent differences, however, both of these works have similar questions at their respective cores. Perhaps most important, both Hämäläinen and Nichols set out to discuss how imperial nations expand and how those nations maintain internal and external order. It is a question that seems a natural fit for a study of early American history and out of place when discussing Native American history.

Yet that is exactly the point of Hämäläinen's award-winning book, The Comanche Empire. The first sentence of his introduction makes that clear. "This book," Hämäläinen writes, "is about an American empire that, according to conventional histories, did not exist" (p.1). Over the next three hundred plus pages he proceeds to explain the rise and fall of an empire created by the Comanche Indians that had its origins in the mid-eighteenth century and that lasted until the final decades of the nineteenth century. Although most historians who have dealt with the Comanches have written about their power and prowess, no one has so effectively related the ways in which the Comanches created an "indigenous empire" that overshadowed and overpowered European imperialism.

In just the past decade, a variety of scholars have delved into the rich and complex world of the present-day American Southwest. James Brooks detailed the role of slavery and captivity in the relations between Indians like the Comanches and the Spanish colonizers who first entered the picture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Both Kathleen Du Val and Juliana Barr have also exposed in distinct ways the native-oriented regions of the Arkansas Valley and early Texas.¹ In these instances and more, scholars have adeptly illustrated that Native peoples had real power in their interactions with the Spaniards, Frenchmen, and Anglo-Americans who ventured into their respective realms. But Hämäläinen's book is more than an assertion of Indian agency or power and, therefore, is more than simply the next contribution to an already impressive and growing historiography. Comanche Empire describes a world in which the Comanche Indians championed their position of authority in a way that "forced the colonists to adjust to a world that was foreign, uncontrollable, and, increasingly, unlivable" (p.16). Although this may not have been an empire as recognized by European leaders of the past or historians of the recent present, the Comanches relied on cultural and political flexibility to establish an imperial presence whose fluctuations turned on events that do not match the more conventional turning points of American history.

One of the great strengths of this book is the comprehensive examination of the origins and early maintenance of the Comanche imperial project. This history begins with conquest as the Comanches migrated onto the southern Great Plains and set off a colonizing mission that had far-reaching political, economic, and cultural impacts. Beginning in the early eighteenth century the Comanches and their Ute allies inserted themselves into a world on the southern plains that brought them into conflict with Apaches who were themselves expanding their reach. Over the course of nearly seventy years, the Comanches relied on strategic alliances and violence to assert control in the region...