The Comanche Empire Quotes

“Washington argued that the takeover of Mexican soil was simply a matter of fulfilling America’s manifest destiny, but on the ground, where military power meant more than political rhetoric, the conquest seemed more propitious than predestined: the Americans who marched into Mexico in the name of destiny and democracy did so in the footsteps of Comanches, whose expansion had paved the way for theirs.”
― Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire

“Comanches had traded bison meat and robes for generations, but that exchange had largely been limited to local subsistence bartering. Now Comanchería’s bison became an animal of enterprise, slaughtered for its commodified hides and robes for distant industrial markets. It was not long before the herds started to show signs of overexploitation.”
― Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire

“The governor found particularly troubling the gun trade chain that extended from Louisiana through the Taovayas to the Comanches; it had the potential, he argued, of becoming "our detriment, especially since this kingdom is so limited in armaments and its settlers too poor to equip themselves and too few to sustain the burden of continuous warfare." Finally, Cachupín was loath to use force against the Comanche simply because New Mexico needed their trade for its economic well-being.”
― Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire

“under the smiles of a benignant heaven,” the Anglo colonists “triumphed over all natural obstacles, expelled the savages by whom the country was infested, reduced the forest into cultivation, and made the desert smile. From this it must appear that the lands of Texas, although nominally given, were in fact really and clearly bought.”
― Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire

“Finally, the Comanche sweep into the Texas plains may have been a response to a changing commercial geography. The expulsion of their Taovaya allies from the Arkansas to the Red River in the 1750s under Osage pressure prompted French traders to refocus their operations from the Arkansas channel to the lower Red River, where an important trading satellite, Fort St. Jean Baptiste aux Natchitoches, had been established in 1716. This sudden shift in commercial gravity must have been a strong incentive for Comanches”
― Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire

“The final subjugation of the Comanches was but a small chapter in this sweeping imperial reorganization. Unleashing its overwhelming economic and technological might, the United States pushed the remains of Comanche power aside with a brief, concentrated scorched-earth campaign. Less an elimination of a military threat than an eradication of a way of life, it was hardly the stuff of which national myths are made. The campaign, along with the Comanche civilization it demolished, was widely ignored and easily forgotten.”
― Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire

“Rather than following the orthodox temporal organization of dividing the early nineteenth-century Southwest into Spanish, Mexican, and American periods, I adopt a spatial approach in order to make visible the geopolitical structures, divides, and continuities enforced by Comanches. Doing so reveals the blueprint of the Comanche empire.”
― Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire

“The removed Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Seminoles had brought with them approximately five thousand black slaves, and the bondage institution persisted in Indian Territory as the planter-slaveholder elite set out to rebuild its exchange-oriented cotton and tobacco economy. This created secure markets for Comanche slavers who now commanded extensive raiding domains in Texas and northern Mexico.”
― Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire

“Over the past three decades, historians have conceived entirely new ways of thinking about Native Americans, Euro-Americans, and their tangled histories. Moving beyond conventional top-down narratives that depict Indians as bit players in imperial struggles or tragic victims of colonial expansion, today’s scholarship portrays them as full-fledged historical actors who played a formative role in the making of early America.”
― Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire

“In the minds of U. S. policymakers who came in direct contact with the human products of Comanche captivity—Mexicans who appeared indistinguishable from Comanches, Mexicans who were neither white nor Indian, Mexicans who refused to leave their Indian masters and seemed to conspire with Comanches against U.S. authority—Mexicanness became entwined with Indianness and thus incompatible with Anglo-Americanness and U.S. citizenship. Comanchería and its slave system, in other words, formed a crucible which forged Anglo-American understandings of Mexicans as a mixed, stigmatized, and subordinated class.”
― Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire