The Comanche Empire

by Pekka Hämäläinen

Pastoralism also gave rise to internal social dynamics that fueled external expansion. Like many other powerful pastoral societies, Comanches developed into a rank society in which men amassed material possessions, especially horses and slaves, to increase their family wealth and to enhance their personal prestige and political influence through gifting and advantageous marriages. Since pillage provided the fastest and broadest avenue to horses and slaves, status competition generated a forceful incentive for external aggression; in this respect, the livestock-and-slave raiding economy, a key component of the Comanche power complex, was a social institution. It would be an exaggeration to say that Comanches became an imperial power because of internal social pressures, but it would also be impossible to understand their expansion without acknowledging the motivational thrust of those pressures.