Comanches All Around
This edition of History Spaghetti comes from Ryan Booth, a Ph.D. student in history. Here, Ryan reviews two recent works that demonstrate the significant impact of Native Americans in the history of the American Southwest. The first, Pekka Hämäläinen’s The Comanche Empire (2008), challenges us to re-consider our conceptions of Indian political, economic, and military power in the Southwest by seeing the Comanches as an imperial power. Just like the Spanish and American empires in the Southwest, between 1700 and 1850 the Comanche empire “imposed their will upon neighboring polities, harnessed the economic potential of other societies for their own use, and persuaded their rivals to adopt and accept their customs and norms” (pg.4). Hämäläinen, Rhodes Professor of American History at Oxford University, avoids the “cameo-appearance” narrative of American history, where Indians only show up for a moment before disappearing, by centering Indians in our understanding of the eighteenth- and n...