[LINK] "Rise and Fall of the Comanche Empire"

[rfmcdonald]

Over at Far Outliers, Joel has a provocative post "Rise and Fall of the Comanche Empire" that copies significant sections of a review of a new book on the Comanche American Indians, Pekka Hämäläinen's The Comanche Empire. In this review, Flynn cites Hämäläinen's apparently well-documented claims that as early as the mid-18th century, the Comanche controlled a vast empire encompassing a very large chunk of central North America, with raiding parties at times making it nearly as far south as Mexico City. The westward expansion of the United States and economic problems doomed this empire by the mid-19th century, in Hämäläinen's reading, but when it existed the empire does seem to have been a glorious achievement.