Missions for Science: U.S. Technology and Medicine in America's African World (review)

Imperialism is drawing the attention of more historians of science, technology, and medicine, as well as environmental historians. Mainly these historians have written about the British and French empires. David McBride's new book focuses on American imperialism. He explores medical and technological aspects of imperialism in four places: the American South, Liberia, Haiti, and the Panama Canal Zone. Of course, only the Canal Zone was a formal colony of the United States, and some historians will be irritated to see the South compared to such dismal places as Haiti and Liberia. Be that as it may, McBride's comparisons are thoughtful and his four "colonies" are similar in that they were inhabited by significant numbers of people whose African ancestors were caught up in the Atlantic slave trade. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, their lives were shaped significantly by the pursuit of improved science, technology, and medicine.

Better drugs and technological practices were introduced by the U.S. military, by government officials, by aid workers confident in their superiority, and by subalterns as various as Booker T. Washington, Liberian President William Tubman, and "Papa Doc" Duvalier, who believed that technology and medicine were essential to modernization, identity, and patronage. The colonial societies McBride describes were similar in that they were remote, rural sites for social relationships that might best be described as "paternalistic." Typically, laws and policies gave businesses easy access to land and labor. McBride extends his comparisons farther afield, too, showing similarities to British and French colonies. He laces his notes and bibliography with references to Michael Adas, David Arnold, and Daniel Headrick, among other historians who have written about medicine, technology, and imperialism.

McBride has done historians a great service in pulling together the medical and technological histories of Haiti, Liberia, and the Panama Canal Zone. Nothing of the sort has been available, which means that this book will become the jumping-off point for future research. The account of Haiti and the rise of Duvalier is especially powerful. We tend to forget that Papa Doc began his career as a doctor. McBride shows how Duvalier got his start in politics by using the connections he made when he was running rural clinics supported by the United States. Medical and technological interventions in Liberia are also nicely described, where the Firestone Corporation established an "enclave economy" around the world's largest rubber plantation. Historians of the U.S. South will find that McBride covers familiar territory: the impact of racial ideologies on agriculture, labor, and technology, and the ways in which racist institutions and practices contributed to the persistence of endemic diseases such as hookworm and malaria. And yet it seems that McBride's main service here is to show the South in comparative context, and he does so convincingly.

Less convincing is McBride's overall argument. He claims that in all four places, U.S. medical and technical experts would have done well to adhere to proven ways of alleviating disease, namely, by delivering better rural health care and by eliminating the social and ecological conditions that fostered endemic disease. This was done most famously by public health officials in the Panama Canal Zone, and yet, according to McBride, during the twentieth century U.S. experts did not follow up on this success by instituting even more extensive public health measures. Instead, he writes, they went in a different direction: their "highest priority becomes understanding scientific processes that are not seeable by the naked eye. With knowledge derived from the molecular world, these experts believe their professional specialties will yield great gains for the public good" (p. 5). McBride shows that U.S. experts did, indeed, put a great deal of emphasis on laboratory research, and perhaps failed to do enough to change the societies they encountered. Third World...