Nomadic Empires, Kinetic Empires

Nomadic empires, imperial formations built by expansionist equestrian societies, are an important theme in world history. Yet they remain woefully undertheorized, their characteristics and histories distorted by sedentary-regime-centered teleologies. They have been labeled as shadow, mirror, or quasi empires, notions that assert that nomadic regimes needed exploitable agrarian states to materialize in the first place and remained structurally dependent on them even when they overshadowed them. Such notions capture something about the intimate relationship between nomadic and sedentary societies, but they also conceal as much as they reveal. They accept state-based territorial empires as paradigmatic and define nomadic regimes against them, focusing less on what they are than what they are not. They reduce nomadic empires to secondary historical phenomena: too parasitical, too imitative, and organizationally too hollow to achieve the self-sufficiency of primary empires. This paper seeks to move beyond the mechanistic and normative interpretations by exploring new ways to understand the powerful nomadic societies on their own conceptual and cultural terms. Using the Comanche Indians as an example, it proposes the notion of kinetic empires, power regimes that revolved around sets of mobile activities—long-distance raids, seasonal expansions, transnational diplomatic missions, semi-permanent trade fairs, and recurring political assemblies. The notion of kinetic empires places non-sedentary forms of power in the front and center, revealing how nomads turned mobility into a strategy and thrived by keeping things—violence, markets, attachments, possessions, themselves—fluid and in motion. Comanches ranged widely but ruled lightly. They wanted resources and loyalty, not unconditional submission or likeness, and they were highly selective conquerors. Their ascendancy rested not on sweeping territorial control but on a capacity to connect vital economic and ecological nodes—trade corridors, grassy river valleys, grain-producing peasant villages, tribute-paying colonial capitals—which allowed them to harness resources without controlling societies.