Engineering Nature: Water, Development, and the Global Spread of American Environmental Expertise

CONCLUSION: The Common World Destiny

CONCLUSION The Common World Destiny The dream of progress shared by Elwood Mead and other California engineers had deep roots in the nineteenth century and persisted into the first half of the twentieth. This was, after all, the time that Frederick H. Newell dubbed the Age of the Engineer, the era when the idea of universal progress took on different variations around the world.1 This vision of progress, based largelyon technical innovation and capitalist growth, paid little heed to questions of race, nationality, culture, and history. Instead, engineers such as George Morison believed that progress—in the form of such aweinspiring creations as railroads, steamships, and telegraph cables—would bring people of all races into contact, break down national divisions, and “finally make the human race a single great whole working intelligently in ways and for ends which we cannot yet understand.” Technology could surmount the environmental and racial barriers that had curtailed the progress of “backward” countries. Electric trolleys, deep-level mines, and irrigation systems would sweep away centuries-old traditions. As California’s engineers circulated the globe with technology, models of development, and ideals in tow, Morison concluded that “the new epoch has barely begun.”2 Technology would, in effect, create what Eric Wolf describes as “common destinies.”3 Morison was not alone in his thinking. From the laying of the first transatlantic cable, Anglo-European engineers, scientists, businessmen, policy makers, and colonial settlers around the world envisioned that technology, free markets, rule of law, scientific education, and other advancements would put the tribes of Africa on equal footing with the “higher” civilizations of Europe. San Francisco celebrated precisely this idealistic notion of progress, of a world brought together by technology (and Anglo-European conquest), with the 1915 World’s Fair. 180 CONCLUSION We now have the historical perspective to understand that this vision was flawed in ways that most of its advocates failed to acknowledge at the time. Nonetheless, it is easy to see why Morison thought the way he did. He lived during an era of economic globalization, laissez-faire, and imperialism. He witnessed Queen Victoria’s empire acquire a quarter of the earth’s landmass . He saw Britain’s foreign economic interests, in the words of English cotton industrialist Richard Cobden, try to act “on the moral world as the principle of gravitation in the universe—drawing men together, thrusting aside the antagonism of race, and creed, and language.”4 And he watched the United States for the first time secure territorial possessions beyond its continental borders. The speed at which such expansion occurred suggested that nations functioned as interrelated units and that a common world destiny, if cast in Anglo-European terms, was indeed possible.5 In the late nineteenth century, scientific knowledge and technical expertise allowed Europeans to exploit regions that had previously remained isolated fromWestern developments and to conferauthority in new ways.6 Diverse products, processes, and ideas aided in imperial conquests. Europeans entered the non-Western world armed with vaccines, ships, electricity, and printing presses. Quinine protected European settlers from malaria. Quickfiring breechloaders replaced muzzle-loaders among the forces stationed on the imperial frontiers. And the compound engine, Suez Canal, and submarine cable decreased travel and communication times across the oceans. These inventions reduced the time and cost of exploiting new territories. By the 1880s, people who set out to conquer new lands exerted far more power over native peoples and foreign environments than had been the case only twenty years earlier.7 This global economy certainly presented unparalleled opportunities for technocrats and ideologues. In particular, California engineers, working in a climate of post-gold-rush technological change, cast their expertise far and wide. William Hammond Hall advised Victoria’s Deakin government on irrigation policy. George and Ben Chaffey tried to replicate their Southern California colony of Ontario in Australia, complete with temperance and scientific education. John Hays Hammond went to South Africa with American ideals about good government, civic independence, and free markets. And Mead applied his agricultural business principles to homesteads in Hawaii and Jewish Palestine. Why few of the California engineers’ exports resulted in a foreign region ’s wholesale adoption of technology or politics reveals the vagaries of history.Variations in institutional arrangements highlighted the differences between host countries and California. Land tenure, labor systems, political 181 CONCLUSION practices, race relations, extent of markets and of transportation systems, and contingencies such as economic depression and...