The Comanche Empire

by Pekka Hämäläinen

The Comanches were a nation that was in a state of constant and at times uncontrolled change, a society that creatively reinvented itself while scrambling to absorb outside pressures, and an imperial people who both savored and struggled with their newly found might. Comanches’ external dominance rested on a series of internal compromises, which kept them balancing between hunting and pastoralism, market production and subsistence production, localism and centralization, egalitarianism and inequality, individual ambition and group solidarity, slavery and assimilation. This internal balancing and compromising sustained the Comanche hegemony, but it was also precarious and dangerous: the Comanche society was a high-strung organism that was constantly threatened by political disarray, economic overheating, and intersocietal conflict. Such hazards would come to haunt the Comanches later in the nineteenth century, but for some 150 years balancing and compromising served them well, supporting their continued expansion and dominance.