The White Man's Burden of Technology

Abstract

Dominance by Design: Technological Imperatives and America's Civilizing Mission is actually two books: history and polemics, with the latter all too often overshadowing the former. The chapters devoted to the period from the conquest of the Philippines to the Cold War offer a nuanced analysis of the interaction between the American ideology of progress, technology, and the acquisition of formal and informal empire. When the author tries to sweep into his argument the conquest of North America and modern political concerns, the result is far less satisfying. The very attempt to put forward a cohesive essentialist argument transcending time, class, regions, and encounters that explains four hundred years of Euro-American interaction with non-Western societies undermines the explanatory value of this monograph. Michael Adas has followed his award-winning Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance1 with an ersatz study of similar phenomena over the course of American history. The arguments of the two books are similar. Westerners’ superior knowledge of science and technology enabled them to dominate the globe, confirmed their sense of cultural superiority, and allowed them to think of colonialism as a civilizing mission. We have come across such books many times before. An established historian eschews careful analysis of a particular subject in favor of an ambitious narrative, founded upon years of acquired wisdom that aims to make sense of some grand force of history. And the result is almost always uneven.