![]() ![]() The epics of conquest one can follow in Comanche empire is really fascinating, and Pekka Hämäläinen’s writing skills turn this fairly complex geopolitical maelström into a pleasant and quite accessible saga. And the incredible rapidity of Comanche raiders and traders to strongly settle down a paradoxically moving supremacy on the Southern Plains in a few decades is properly speaking vertiginous. The other known cause of vertigo on the human body is speed. One of them is obviously the enormity of the spaces considered in the work, from the upper Arkansas river up to central Mexico Bajío. I-VertigoĥThe main feeling I had while reading this book is that of vertigo, caused by several factors. It is undeniable that with this book Pekka Hämäläinen, much in line with the “New Indian History”, makes a valuable contribution to the debate, as he strongly underlines two main historical and ethno historical weaknesses : on the one hand the myopic effects of microscale analysis, which makes it practically impossible to embrace the entire dimension of a such a phenomenon as the Comanche expansion, and, on the other hand, the blind spot of national (or monoimperial) focus, which can only catch glimpses of small bursts of Indian agency, at its very edges, and never understands the central place reached by (American) Indians alliances who precisely succeeded in inserting themselves in a complex multipolar political, military and commercial game between all three European rival empires engaged in the region.Ĥ Nevertheless, there are of course some points which didn’t utterly convince us, or left us a little bit sceptical –namely the very empire thing– but it probably comes from our own microscale deformation. 1 This short commentary intends to throw out a few ideas that came out following the Comanche historic trail as it appears in Pekka Hämäläinen’s presentation in its many awards 2009 essay, now translated into french and spanish.Ģ Of course, the following remarks will probably be biased by our own early Hispanic American ethno historical concerns, but it should not be seen as a handicap, more as some kind of properly speaking outsider’s point of view, which is sometimes useful.ģ So first of all, it, we’ll try to point out what, in our opinion, Pekka Hämäläinen’s strong methodological commitment, really brings about, especially what he calls his shift in scale and focus in order to open a clearer view to the governing macroscale dynamics.
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