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http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n24/roger-hodge/hunter-capitalists
A review of a new book by S.C. Gwynne titled "Empire of the Summer
Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanche Tribe"
that I plan to get around to at some point.
Hodge, btw, is the author of the excellent "Mendacity of Hope" on
Obama.
I find this part of Hodge's review intriguing:
"Gwynne’s portrait, conforming to the old notion of the Comanches
as a ‘barrier’ to American settlement, focuses on the anarchism of
Comanche politics, their undeniable brutality, their astonishing
horsemanship and their alleged ugliness (compared with whom, the
Texan settlers?). The book abounds in accounts of torture,
disembowelment, scalping and gang rape, but the general drift of
the narrative is one of Comanche victimhood. Yet as Hämäläinen and
other recent historians have shown, for more than a century the
Comanches dictated the terms of their relations, both military and
commercial, with Spain, Britain, France, Mexico, Texas and the
United States. New Mexico was nothing less than a Comanche colony.
Gwynne remarks at one point, when discussing the relentless
conflict between Apaches and Comanches, that ‘ironically’ the
Apaches were doomed by their pursuit of agriculture, ‘a higher
form of civilisation than the Comanches ever attained’. Such
simplistic notions overlook the complexity of Comanche society at
its zenith. The Comanches were buffalo hunters, but they were far
from being primitive hunter-gatherers simply following the herds
and carrying out raids in the spring and summer. The adaptability
that led them to adopt the horse so enthusiastically enabled the
Comanches to create a hybrid market-based culture of great
sophistication. They were hunter-capitalists whose enormous wealth
was accumulated above all in the form of horses."
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