Hämäläinen, Pekka. Comanche Empire. (2008)

The Comanche Empire, the 2009 winner of the Bancroft Prize in American History, is a piece of revisionist history which addresses the rise and fall of the Comanche Empire, a Native American tribal nation which, after being pushed into the American plains, restructured and adapted to the area with such great success that they became an awesome power to be reckoned with for the competing colonial projects converging in the area. The book aims to make out previously concealed patterns in Comanche politics through a distinct methodology: “instead of looking at events from colonial frontiers inward—a traditional approach that inevitably ties explanations to contemporary Western biases – this book looks at developments from Comanchería outward” (12). What this approach does, for the larger project of understanding colonial exploitation, is that it nuances and complicates the role of the victim, breaking down the dualistic opposition of perpetrator and victim.

The author, Pekka Hämäläinen, is a Rhodes Professor of American History, and has received ERC grants for his research into nomadic cultures in the American Plains. His other notable texts, Lakota America (2019) and Indigenous Continent (2022), work to centre Indigenous autonomy and political action in the rewriting of the history of the American Southwest. The Comanche Empire, which has received twelve book awards and has been translated into Spanish and French, tracks the Comanches’ “spiral of growing power and influence” (11) in the Great Plains, arguing that they not only cooperated and compromised with the surrounding Spanish and French frontiers, but that they also exploited, extorted, coerced exchange with, and politically manipulated those colonies (11). Rather than present the Comanche story as a victim narrative, this text works to dismantle “the old image of the Southwest as a world of innately passive peoples, frozen in time and disconnected from the main currents of American history” (10). Within the realm of Perpetrator Studies, this form of revisionist history presents the reader with an in-depth, alternative image of victims of colonial conquest. While previous accounts have treated Comanches as a passive, reactionary people, Hämäläinen’s writing builds a more accurate vision of this group as having their own, sometimes paradoxical, but nevertheless systematic and meditated approach to colonial politics. The book follows a chronological order of the Comanches’ conquests and setbacks, with chapters detailing their physical, as well as political, moves.

Author of this entry: Flora Lehmann.

Hämäläinen, Pekka. The Comanche Empire. Yale University Press, 2008.