Ned Blackhawk's "Violence over the Land" presents the empirical record from the Spanish West, the areas of New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and the Great Basin country of Utah and Nevada where the various Ute, Pauite, and Shoshone tribes lived. The age of modern empire brought first the Spanish empire and its clashes with the British and French empires, followed by the Spanish and American clashes that resulted in American supremacy across the continent. It is a perspective of an expanding American empire overtaking a weakened Spanish empire (after 1824, the Republic of Mexico), based on the view that American continental expansion was as much more about empire and empirical control of property, wealth, and resources, as any other civilizing drive.Blackhawk effectively weaves a story beginning with the Spanish, involving the rise of equestrian nations from captured and stolen horses, the effects of disease, the changes in tribal economies brought about by settlements and trade for products increasingly in demand as they became necessary for survival and accommodation to the newcomers, rifles and ammunition. Slavery played a large role in the economies of the area.The violence that is the subject of this book, of "Indians and Empires," carries itself forward today with American imperial ambitions around the globe. It is both the predominant military violence and its inter-woven cultural aspects, with the changing manner of accommodation by the groups that encounter and resist that violence. The American empire was born of violence, and as ably demonstrated by "Violence over the Land," grew through violence to become the violent society and empire it remains today.

Ned Blackhawk hasdone much justice to the history of his people and the manner in which the west developed, and the manner in which the American empire progressed.