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  • Dominance by Design: Technological Imperatives and America’s Civilizing Mission
  • John H. Morrow Jr. (bio)
Dominance by Design: Technological Imperatives and America’s Civilizing Mission. By Michael Adas . Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006. Pp. 542. $29.95.

Michael Adas has written an excellent and most timely study of the oft-forgotten role of technology in enabling and then justifying European colonization of North America, the westward expansion of the United States, and ultimately the emergence of the United States as a global power with its imperial missions in the Philippines, East Asia, and the Middle East. This book focuses on the motivations and means that technological imperatives provided for American expansion. In his successful effort to rectify historians' marginalization of technological factors in this expansion, Adas includes motives such as market capitalism, religion, democratic principles, and great-power rivalries.

A major contribution of Dominance by Design is to refocus the lens through which many Americans view the quest for empire. All too often, studies of American expansion, such as Max Boot's Savage Wars of Peace and the multitude of works on the United States in Vietnam, focus on the military aspects of these ventures. The success or failure of military exploits—war, violence, conquest, pacification—dominate the perspective in which such books address the American experience abroad.

Adas examines American attitudes toward technology not just in a military sense, but also in the broader cultural context—that is, attitudes toward technology in general. He consequently points readers to more fundamental factors in the U.S. relationship with other parts of the world: the reasons for undertaking expansionist and imperial ventures, and their success or failure in transforming these regions according to our idealized visions for their future (which stem from idealized and mythical visions of America) not [End Page 413] merely through military power, but through the entire range of our international relationships—cultural, financial, and diplomatic, to name a few.

Adas's nuanced approach leaves this reader with the overall impression of the failure of American policies, from the Philippines and Japan in the Pacific in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the Middle East today. The United States has proved incapable of formulating reasoned and achievable policies of transformation because of racist arrogance; an inability to understand the broader social and cultural context, including gender relationships, of these distant areas of the globe; and a penchant for resorting to grandiose technological solutions, including the use of military force based on technological superiority, to achieve often misbegotten aims. Just as Adas's book penetrates the idealistic and peaceful portrayals of westward expansion by contemporary artists (which he uses for illustrations) to reveal their material and violent essence, his work also delineates the failure of our global policies toward the non-European regions of the world, in which our inability to bring our technological capabilities to bear constructively has prompted a resort to equally abortive military ventures.

I have only two regrets about this work. First, that Adas did not include Africa within his scope, especially since his paradigm has the capacity to explain why the United States tends to ignore Africa. Second, in regard to his conceptualization of the role of racism, he argues that the American sense of an ability to impart technology to such peoples as the Japanese and Filipinos demonstrates an attenuation of American racist attitudes. While this reader wishes that technology held the power to attenuate in some significant fashion deep-seated American racist attitudes toward other peoples, it seems that any attenuation applies at most only to the few members of the comprador class and not to the broader masses, whom Americans often despise all the more because they cannot emulate the elite few whom we appreciate. Yet these are minor quibbles about a work that provides a much-needed antidote to and context for many of the more superficial and triumphalistic approaches to the history of American continental and global expansion. Adas has written an enlightened and enlightening study of the role of technology in U.S. imperial expansion.

John H. Morrow

John Morrow is Franklin Professor of History at the University of Georgia...

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