ABSTRACT
But the salient examples of indigenous expansionism in North America were not to come from the oak and pine forests of the Old Northwest or the pine barrens and cypress swamps of Florida, but, as in Africa, from its grassland expanses. Just as the most powerful of the indigenous empires in nineteenthcentury Africa took shape behind Shaka Zulu’s ‘foot cavalry’ on the veldt of southern Africa or Hausa and Tukolor paladins on the savannas of central and West Africa,30 so their equivalents in North America came into being on the southern and northern Great Plains of the USA as a result of the exertions of the aggressive horsemen of the Comanche and Sioux confederations.31
