Kinetic Imperialism: The Equestrian Power of the Mongols and the Comanches

This paper examines the similarities and differences between the imperial nomadic confederacies of the Mongols and the Comanches—their horsed-powered expansions, foreign policies, social organization, disintegration, and legacies.  At first glance, differences in scope and context might seem to preclude meaningful comparisons: the Mongols controlled much of inner Asia in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and expanded into China, Russia, and Europe, dwarfing the Comanches’ political economy in the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century American Southwest.  However, a structural analysis of political dynamics and spatial strategies of control reveal compelling parallels between the two confederacies, which in turn point to new ways of understanding mobility, equestrian nomadism, and imperial formation.  The operative analytical framework here is “kinetic imperialism.”  Despite differences in scope, the Mongols and the Comanches can both be seen as kinetic empires that revolved around sets of mobile activities: long-distance mounted raids, tribute extraction through frontier excursions, recurrent seasonal expansions, transnational diplomatic missions, semi-permanent trade fairs, long-distance herding, and control over key ecological niches.  Instead of uncompromised territorial control, both societies sought territorial integration through exchange, assimilation, kinship politics, and cultural dissemination, and both became domineering people who were comfortable with porous boundaries, flexible hierarchies, and contingent loyalties.  The Mongols and the Comanches kept things—people, boundaries, alliances, markets—fluid and in motion, capitalizing on their mobility to build imperial organizations that endured not in spite of but because of their nodal and mutable makeup.  Equestrian empires have been variously labeled as “shadow empires,” “mirror empires,” and “vulture empires,” the epithets marking their differences to classic sedentary empires.  By providing a broad analytical framework for mobile, non-sedentary empires, “kinetic imperialism,” I argue, helps challenge normative assumptions about what empires are and have been.