3. INDIGENOUS EMPIRES AND NATIVE NATIONS: BEYOND HISTORY AND ETHNOHISTORY IN PEKKA HÄMÄLÄINEN'S THE COMANCHE EMPIRE

How should historians write Native history? To what extent should one privilege Native terms, sources, chronologies, and epistemologies? And to what extent should historians align Native history with concepts developed for other peoples and places? These crucial questions about emic (insider) and etic (outsider) approaches to the past are cast into sharp relief in Pekka Hämäläinen's award‐winning The Comanche Empire. This essay charts the perils and possibilities of each position. It then explores possible ways to move beyond the emic/etic division that has dominated many of the recent debates about Native history through a rereading of an episode in which Comanche history collides with US and Mexican history.     

2. INDIGENOUS POWER IN THE COMANCHE EMPIRE

Pekka Hämäläinen's The Comanche Empire reflects critical historiographical turns—indigenous power, responses to settler colonialism, and a reorientation of perspective—while uncovering new directions in American Indian history. Moreover, his four‐part framework for understanding power—spatial control, economic control, assimilation, and influence over neighbors—provides a useful model for analyzing indigenous polities in other places and times. However, by not explicitly framing the narrative of the Comanche empire within notions of sovereignty, Hämäläinen leaves open opportunities for other scholars of the Comanche and of Native North America. Future historical studies of Native sovereignty, though, should include tribally specific notions of sovereignty and ways of knowing and remembering the past.     

1. INTRODUCTION

Why were mid‐nineteenth‐century Hispanic populations so small in what is now the American Southwest, after centuries of colonization? A brilliant new literature provides a model of explanation in the authority of formidable indigenous polities, especially that great power that Pekka Hämäläinen reveals to us in his book The Comanche Empire. ¹ 1 Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
Employing an exercise in cartographic history, centered on the Pecos River Valley, we can confirm a hypothesis drawn from that theoretical model: Comanche sway was so great that European mapmakers appear to have lost knowledge about that geographical region. This new historical model deserves close attention from scholars. In this forum, four leading historians, drawn from different fields, assess the contribution of The Comanche Empire.     

4. GLOBALIZING THE COMANCHE EMPIRE

The Comanche rose by adapting to the technological and trade opportunities brought to New Mexico by the eighteenth‐century expansion of New Spain's globally linked silver economy. They built an empire that flourished in the first half of the nineteenth century, dominating vast areas of the high plains and controlling complex trades, just as a social revolution within Mexico's wars of independence undermined the silver economy and ended its northward dynamism. Comanche power flourished between a struggling Mexico and an expanding US, until the military and industrial power of the latter combined with the ecological vulnerabilities of the Comanche economy to enable the Anglo‐American triumph in what should be called the War for North America of 1846–1848. The US claimed a continental West from an uncertain Mexican sovereignty and an assertive Comanche empire of war and trade. The expansion and collapse of New Spain, the rise and fall of the Comanche empire, and the rise of the United States all occurred within an evolving globalization. Spanish North America expanded to 1810; Comanche power rose in the eighteenth century and soared after 1810 as Mexico struggled with the challenges of nation‐making; then the United States defeated both to claim continental hegemony in the 1840s. These expansions, conflicts, and changes—all tied to larger processes of globalization—reshaped North America between 1700 and 1850.