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Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance
Over the past five centuries, advances in Western understanding of and control over the material world have strongly influenced European responses to non-Western peoples and cultures. In Machines as the Measure of Men, Michael Adas explores the ways in which European perceptions of their scientific and technological superiority shaped their interactions with people overseas. Adopting a broad, comparative perspective, he analyzes European responses to the cultures of sub-Saharan Africa, India, and China, cultures that they judged to represent lower levels of material mastery and social organization.
Beginning with the early decades of overseas expansion in the sixteenth century, Adas traces the impact of scientific and technological advances on European attitudes toward Asians and Africans and on their policies for dealing with colonized societies. He concentrates on British and French thinking in the nineteenth century, when, he maintains, scientific and technological measures of human worth played a critical role in shaping arguments for the notion of racial supremacy and the "civilizing mission" ideology which were used to justify Europe's domination of the globe. Finally, he examines the reasons why many Europeans grew dissatisfied with and even rejected this gauge of human worth after World War I, and explains why it has remained important to Americans.
Showing how the scientific and industrial revolutions contributed to the development of European imperialist ideologies, Machines as the Measure of Men highlights the cultural factors that have nurtured disdain for non-Western accomplishments and value systems. It also indicates how these attitudes, in shaping policies that restricted the diffusion of scientific knowledge, have perpetuated themselves, and contributed significantly to chronic underdevelopment throughout the developing world. Adas's far-reaching and provocative book will be compelling reading for all who are concerned about the history of Western imperialism and its legacies.
First published to wide acclaim in 1989, Machines as the Measure of Men is now available in a new edition that features a preface by the author that discusses how subsequent developments in gender and race studies, as well as global technology and politics, enter into conversation with his original arguments.
Beginning with the early decades of overseas expansion in the sixteenth century, Adas traces the impact of scientific and technological advances on European attitudes toward Asians and Africans and on their policies for dealing with colonized societies. He concentrates on British and French thinking in the nineteenth century, when, he maintains, scientific and technological measures of human worth played a critical role in shaping arguments for the notion of racial supremacy and the "civilizing mission" ideology which were used to justify Europe's domination of the globe. Finally, he examines the reasons why many Europeans grew dissatisfied with and even rejected this gauge of human worth after World War I, and explains why it has remained important to Americans.
Showing how the scientific and industrial revolutions contributed to the development of European imperialist ideologies, Machines as the Measure of Men highlights the cultural factors that have nurtured disdain for non-Western accomplishments and value systems. It also indicates how these attitudes, in shaping policies that restricted the diffusion of scientific knowledge, have perpetuated themselves, and contributed significantly to chronic underdevelopment throughout the developing world. Adas's far-reaching and provocative book will be compelling reading for all who are concerned about the history of Western imperialism and its legacies.
First published to wide acclaim in 1989, Machines as the Measure of Men is now available in a new edition that features a preface by the author that discusses how subsequent developments in gender and race studies, as well as global technology and politics, enter into conversation with his original arguments.
456 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1989
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448 people want to read
About the author
Michael B. Adas
37 books10 followersMichael Adas is an American historian and currently the Abraham E. Voorhees Professor of History at Rutgers University. He specializes in the history of technology, the history of anticolonialism and in global history.
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April 5, 2023
4.5 stars.
Comps reading. I very much enjoyed this book. Its main argument was that the main form of colonial chauvinism, at least initially, was not ‘racism’ (in its strict sense of there being biologically distinct types of humans), but largely had to do with evaluations of human culture that took technological capacity as a proxy for cultural superiority. It is therefore a book that documents European commentary on the technological abilities of other societies they encountered on colonial expeditions.
I was a master’s student in engineering and international development and I think anyone who’s spent some time as a student or practitioner in that (fairly dubious and often neo-colonial) field would find this book very interesting. Adas makes an interesting remark about the anti-communist origins of post-war modernization theory and insists its continuity with older forms of colonialism:
“Critics of modernization theory, who argue that it is primarily a Cold War response, an attempt by American social scientists and policymakers to counter the appeal of Communism to the peoples of the underdeveloped world, distort the origins and significance of the tradition-to-modernity paradigm. As the term “Non-Communist Manifesto”—the subtitle of Walter W. Rostow’s influential work The Stages of Economic Growth—suggests, there were in fact links between the Cold War struggle and the great emphasis on development and modernization in the works of American social scientists in the 1950s and 1960s. But virtually all the assumptions and perspectives that informed the writings of those who proposed the many and diverse theories of modernization that appeared in this period long predated the global rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. Though recast in development jargon in the post-World War II era, most of the ideas associated with modernization theory had been formulated decades, sometimes centuries, earlier. These ideas were deeply rooted in both America’s own historical experience and the currents of European thought that have been the focus of this study. From the time of the earliest European settlement in North America, chroniclers, missionaries, and colonizers made much of the technological gap between the peoples of the Old World and those of the New.”
The cultural superiority that this book examines has roots in Christian chauvinism, where European illusions about superior capacities to understand transcendent truths were initially explained by appealing to their adherence to the ‘singularly true faith’ of Christianity (Chapter 1). Even after the Scientific Revolution, Christianity remained a common appeal, but increasingly scientific and technological markers overtook these religious ones (Chapter 2). The empirical nature of these criteria is what Adas identifies as the primary reason they became the principle measure of human capacities during the industrial age, as the unprecedented control over nature that this age enabled in Europe became the justification that European knowledge much more closely corresponded with the underlying truths of reality (Chapter 3). This came to shape European imperialism’s ideological convictions (Chapter 4) and the emerging ideology of white supremacy and colonial education projects to remould colonized societies (Chapter 5). Finally, the mass scale of human slaughter that characterized WW1 provoked many European intellectuals to challenge the notion that more technological and scientific capacity translated into a better understanding of transcendent truths (Chapter 6).
There is a rather interesting section in here entitled “Displacement and Revolution: Marx on the Impact of Machines in Asia” (p. 277-281) showing that Marx and Engels believed colonialism was motivated by the only most depraved of human interests, and that colonial projects of introducing science and machines into colonial societies were largely hypocritical and more evidence of bourgeois hypocrisy. However, following Edward Said’s critical interpretation, Adas also claims Marx’s early writings saw colonial domination as unintentionally revolutionary and beneficial (e.g. would help dissolve caste hierarchies in South Asia). Adas also accuses Marx of Eurocentrism at times, which again is not something that many Marxists today would deny, including Samir Amin.
It was very interesting to get a cursory view of the travel writing sources on which Adas draws heavily, and seeing how various European intellectuals assessed unfamiliar societies and their systems of knowledge. At times though it was hard to read, because of how racist some of the stuff was (perhaps not in the strict sense of scientific racism, but the cultural chauvinism was often really disturbing). I found the ideological origins of utilitarianism in imperialism very interesting, especially in light of recent discourse on so-called TESCREAL ideologies (I saw McKenzie Wark retweet this saying "Thread on the current most batshit ruling class ideologies") — a cluster of ideologies including effective altruism and longtermism — and its origins in eugenics (for more info, see this talk given by Timnit Gebru at an IEEE conference, though admittedly a scientist of the left, J.D. Bernal, was also a founding figure of transhumanism). Anyway, Adas on utilitarians like Mill:
“Taken together, these accounts by men with years of service in India belittled Indian achievements in science and technology as a whole and provided abundant ammunition for Mill’s all-out assault on the Orientalists’ image of India as a great civilization. James Mill’s critique of virtually all things Indian was more comprehensive than Grant’s or Ward’s and largely devoid of the qualifications with which these earlier writers had hedged many of their pronouncements. Driven by the Utilitarian belief that general principles could be found on which all human polities and societies could be effectively organized and run, Mill employed what he had learned about India to illustrate how societies should not be structured and administered. Often using Indian beliefs and institutions as surrogates for those in England itself which he found offensive and wished to attack, he criticized Indian civilization with a lack of restraint made possible by the paucity of its defenders and the utter ignorance of the British reading public beyond a small circle of Orientalists and retired East India Company officials. Mill found virtually nothing to praise in Indian society, past or present. Indian religion was “gross and disgusting” and Indian law “impossibly backward”; all manner of Indian creations from art and architecture to historical records were summarily dismissed as “rude.”?”
Speaking of eugenics, there was this great little passage on phrenology that involved the utopian socialist Fourier and his anarchist rival Proudhon:
“by the last decades of the [19th] century, phrenology had become a marketable object of mass culture as evidenced by the booths for “head reading” found at British seaside resorts.°° In France an opponent of phrenology confessed in the 1840s that its doctrines had “invaded everything,” a claim given credence by Pierre Proudhon’s dismissal of his rival Francois Fourier’s ideas in part because of the small size of Fourier’s skull and his “mediocre cerebral development.” Nor was the impact of phrenology restricted to fiction and intellectual quarrels. It exerted some influence on the course of events from the mid-nineteenth century onward, an influence that has never been fully explored. Charles Darwin recounted, for example, that he was nearly denied a place on the Beagle because Captain Fitzroy thought anyone with a nose like his could not possibly “possess sufficient energy and determination for the voyage.””
There were also some interesting remarks about romanticists like Blake who criticized industrialism, as well as on other utopian socialists like Owen who also had similar criticisms but recognized the potentially liberatory possibilities of machines:
“Critics as diverse as Robert Owen and William Blake, Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell drew attention to the pollution of the factory towns and the miserable condition of the workers whose ranks, particularly in textile mills, included a high proportion of women and children in the early industrial era… As Maxine Berg has shown, working-class spokesmen and radical intellectuals could both deplore the dislocations and suffering brought on by the “iron monster[s] with a pulse of steam” and promote machines “adapted to the needs of co-operative production” as essential elements in the workers’ utopias they aspired to create. Even Owen and his disciples stressed the many ways in which mechanization could relieve workers, both male and female, from the drudgery of routine tasks, from sawing and grinding to cooking and washing clothes!”
“Tory and radical critiques of the filthy factory districts and miserable workers’ slums— familiar features of industrialization in what Lewis Mumford has termed the paleotechnic phase—grew into a broad-based anticapitalist and anti-industrial backlash in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A gentlemanly, aristocratic amateur ideal was championed in a struggle against the ascendancy of a profit- and productivity-obsessed elite of industrialists, financiers, and technicians. But this assault on William Blake’s “dark Satanic Mills” and the values of the capitalist entrepreneur was for the most part a domestic campaign. Weiner’s contention that “Imperialists and ‘patriotic’ writers [in the late nineteenth century] rarely saw industrial progress as an appropriate source of inspiration”*? is at odds with the frequent invocation in this period of technological and scientific proofs of British superiority.”
A little William Morris in the mix too:
“Even the craft techniques and tools that such implacable critics of industrialization as William Morris and John Ruskin worked to preserve or restore had been used in earlier centuries as a gauge of European superiority in the “arts” over non-Western peoples. In the anticapitalist, anti-industrial utopia that Morris created in his 1891 News from Nowhere, all manner of machines were available, but his utopians used only those they found “handy” and ignored those that seemed unnecessary.*° Thus, despite recurring depressions, England’s eclipse as the leading industrial power by Germany and the United States, and a growing sense of the perils of unlimited mechanization, numerous late-Victorian authors exulted in Britain’s scientific acumen and inventive genius. Many of those who saw scientific and industrial achievements as the best proof of British “racial” or national superiority had little use for the aesthetic misgivings of Ruskin or for Morris's socialist critiques.”
I also wrote a class paper about this aspect of imperialism that Lenin memorably underscores in his work, and how imperialists thought it was their moral duty to relieve the lot of poor Europeans by taking control of distant lands and resettling their people onto them, because those non-Europeans did not know how to fully make use of the natural resources at their disposal:
“The criticisms of earlier travelers to Africa, remarking on the inefficient exploitation of forest and mineral resources, often implied that if Europeans settled or controlled these areas, their resources could rapidly be harnessed to production for the world market. Similar arguments continued to be made by European observers throughout the nineteenth century. In fact, the growing demand for raw materials in industrializing areas in Europe and North America became (despite its neglect by writers on imperialist exploitation, such as Lenin, who placed unwarranted stress on the need to export Europe’s surplus capital)”° one of the most frequently cited rationales for imperialist expansion into Africa, southeast Asia, and even heavily populated and extensively cultivated areas such as China. As Thomas Carlyle’s highly charged 1840 essay “Chartism” makes clear, the need to discover and exploit untapped resources was for many writers more than a mere pretext for European conquest and domination of other peoples; it was a moral obligation. Carlyle seethed with indignation over the widespread poverty and unemployment in England when overseas there existed “a world where Canadian Forests stand unfelled, boundless Plains and Prairies unbroken with the plough...green desert spaces never yet made white with corn; and to the overcrowded little western nook of Europe, our Terrestrial Planet, nine-tenths of it yet vacant or tenanted by nomades, is still crying, Come and till me, come and reap me!”’!
I’ll leave it at that. There are quite a few conclusions that I disagree with in this book, but overall it was an excellent read that was endlessly fascinating!
Comps reading. I very much enjoyed this book. Its main argument was that the main form of colonial chauvinism, at least initially, was not ‘racism’ (in its strict sense of there being biologically distinct types of humans), but largely had to do with evaluations of human culture that took technological capacity as a proxy for cultural superiority. It is therefore a book that documents European commentary on the technological abilities of other societies they encountered on colonial expeditions.
I was a master’s student in engineering and international development and I think anyone who’s spent some time as a student or practitioner in that (fairly dubious and often neo-colonial) field would find this book very interesting. Adas makes an interesting remark about the anti-communist origins of post-war modernization theory and insists its continuity with older forms of colonialism:
“Critics of modernization theory, who argue that it is primarily a Cold War response, an attempt by American social scientists and policymakers to counter the appeal of Communism to the peoples of the underdeveloped world, distort the origins and significance of the tradition-to-modernity paradigm. As the term “Non-Communist Manifesto”—the subtitle of Walter W. Rostow’s influential work The Stages of Economic Growth—suggests, there were in fact links between the Cold War struggle and the great emphasis on development and modernization in the works of American social scientists in the 1950s and 1960s. But virtually all the assumptions and perspectives that informed the writings of those who proposed the many and diverse theories of modernization that appeared in this period long predated the global rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. Though recast in development jargon in the post-World War II era, most of the ideas associated with modernization theory had been formulated decades, sometimes centuries, earlier. These ideas were deeply rooted in both America’s own historical experience and the currents of European thought that have been the focus of this study. From the time of the earliest European settlement in North America, chroniclers, missionaries, and colonizers made much of the technological gap between the peoples of the Old World and those of the New.”
The cultural superiority that this book examines has roots in Christian chauvinism, where European illusions about superior capacities to understand transcendent truths were initially explained by appealing to their adherence to the ‘singularly true faith’ of Christianity (Chapter 1). Even after the Scientific Revolution, Christianity remained a common appeal, but increasingly scientific and technological markers overtook these religious ones (Chapter 2). The empirical nature of these criteria is what Adas identifies as the primary reason they became the principle measure of human capacities during the industrial age, as the unprecedented control over nature that this age enabled in Europe became the justification that European knowledge much more closely corresponded with the underlying truths of reality (Chapter 3). This came to shape European imperialism’s ideological convictions (Chapter 4) and the emerging ideology of white supremacy and colonial education projects to remould colonized societies (Chapter 5). Finally, the mass scale of human slaughter that characterized WW1 provoked many European intellectuals to challenge the notion that more technological and scientific capacity translated into a better understanding of transcendent truths (Chapter 6).
There is a rather interesting section in here entitled “Displacement and Revolution: Marx on the Impact of Machines in Asia” (p. 277-281) showing that Marx and Engels believed colonialism was motivated by the only most depraved of human interests, and that colonial projects of introducing science and machines into colonial societies were largely hypocritical and more evidence of bourgeois hypocrisy. However, following Edward Said’s critical interpretation, Adas also claims Marx’s early writings saw colonial domination as unintentionally revolutionary and beneficial (e.g. would help dissolve caste hierarchies in South Asia). Adas also accuses Marx of Eurocentrism at times, which again is not something that many Marxists today would deny, including Samir Amin.
It was very interesting to get a cursory view of the travel writing sources on which Adas draws heavily, and seeing how various European intellectuals assessed unfamiliar societies and their systems of knowledge. At times though it was hard to read, because of how racist some of the stuff was (perhaps not in the strict sense of scientific racism, but the cultural chauvinism was often really disturbing). I found the ideological origins of utilitarianism in imperialism very interesting, especially in light of recent discourse on so-called TESCREAL ideologies (I saw McKenzie Wark retweet this saying "Thread on the current most batshit ruling class ideologies") — a cluster of ideologies including effective altruism and longtermism — and its origins in eugenics (for more info, see this talk given by Timnit Gebru at an IEEE conference, though admittedly a scientist of the left, J.D. Bernal, was also a founding figure of transhumanism). Anyway, Adas on utilitarians like Mill:
“Taken together, these accounts by men with years of service in India belittled Indian achievements in science and technology as a whole and provided abundant ammunition for Mill’s all-out assault on the Orientalists’ image of India as a great civilization. James Mill’s critique of virtually all things Indian was more comprehensive than Grant’s or Ward’s and largely devoid of the qualifications with which these earlier writers had hedged many of their pronouncements. Driven by the Utilitarian belief that general principles could be found on which all human polities and societies could be effectively organized and run, Mill employed what he had learned about India to illustrate how societies should not be structured and administered. Often using Indian beliefs and institutions as surrogates for those in England itself which he found offensive and wished to attack, he criticized Indian civilization with a lack of restraint made possible by the paucity of its defenders and the utter ignorance of the British reading public beyond a small circle of Orientalists and retired East India Company officials. Mill found virtually nothing to praise in Indian society, past or present. Indian religion was “gross and disgusting” and Indian law “impossibly backward”; all manner of Indian creations from art and architecture to historical records were summarily dismissed as “rude.”?”
Speaking of eugenics, there was this great little passage on phrenology that involved the utopian socialist Fourier and his anarchist rival Proudhon:
“by the last decades of the [19th] century, phrenology had become a marketable object of mass culture as evidenced by the booths for “head reading” found at British seaside resorts.°° In France an opponent of phrenology confessed in the 1840s that its doctrines had “invaded everything,” a claim given credence by Pierre Proudhon’s dismissal of his rival Francois Fourier’s ideas in part because of the small size of Fourier’s skull and his “mediocre cerebral development.” Nor was the impact of phrenology restricted to fiction and intellectual quarrels. It exerted some influence on the course of events from the mid-nineteenth century onward, an influence that has never been fully explored. Charles Darwin recounted, for example, that he was nearly denied a place on the Beagle because Captain Fitzroy thought anyone with a nose like his could not possibly “possess sufficient energy and determination for the voyage.””
There were also some interesting remarks about romanticists like Blake who criticized industrialism, as well as on other utopian socialists like Owen who also had similar criticisms but recognized the potentially liberatory possibilities of machines:
“Critics as diverse as Robert Owen and William Blake, Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell drew attention to the pollution of the factory towns and the miserable condition of the workers whose ranks, particularly in textile mills, included a high proportion of women and children in the early industrial era… As Maxine Berg has shown, working-class spokesmen and radical intellectuals could both deplore the dislocations and suffering brought on by the “iron monster[s] with a pulse of steam” and promote machines “adapted to the needs of co-operative production” as essential elements in the workers’ utopias they aspired to create. Even Owen and his disciples stressed the many ways in which mechanization could relieve workers, both male and female, from the drudgery of routine tasks, from sawing and grinding to cooking and washing clothes!”
“Tory and radical critiques of the filthy factory districts and miserable workers’ slums— familiar features of industrialization in what Lewis Mumford has termed the paleotechnic phase—grew into a broad-based anticapitalist and anti-industrial backlash in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A gentlemanly, aristocratic amateur ideal was championed in a struggle against the ascendancy of a profit- and productivity-obsessed elite of industrialists, financiers, and technicians. But this assault on William Blake’s “dark Satanic Mills” and the values of the capitalist entrepreneur was for the most part a domestic campaign. Weiner’s contention that “Imperialists and ‘patriotic’ writers [in the late nineteenth century] rarely saw industrial progress as an appropriate source of inspiration”*? is at odds with the frequent invocation in this period of technological and scientific proofs of British superiority.”
A little William Morris in the mix too:
“Even the craft techniques and tools that such implacable critics of industrialization as William Morris and John Ruskin worked to preserve or restore had been used in earlier centuries as a gauge of European superiority in the “arts” over non-Western peoples. In the anticapitalist, anti-industrial utopia that Morris created in his 1891 News from Nowhere, all manner of machines were available, but his utopians used only those they found “handy” and ignored those that seemed unnecessary.*° Thus, despite recurring depressions, England’s eclipse as the leading industrial power by Germany and the United States, and a growing sense of the perils of unlimited mechanization, numerous late-Victorian authors exulted in Britain’s scientific acumen and inventive genius. Many of those who saw scientific and industrial achievements as the best proof of British “racial” or national superiority had little use for the aesthetic misgivings of Ruskin or for Morris's socialist critiques.”
I also wrote a class paper about this aspect of imperialism that Lenin memorably underscores in his work, and how imperialists thought it was their moral duty to relieve the lot of poor Europeans by taking control of distant lands and resettling their people onto them, because those non-Europeans did not know how to fully make use of the natural resources at their disposal:
“The criticisms of earlier travelers to Africa, remarking on the inefficient exploitation of forest and mineral resources, often implied that if Europeans settled or controlled these areas, their resources could rapidly be harnessed to production for the world market. Similar arguments continued to be made by European observers throughout the nineteenth century. In fact, the growing demand for raw materials in industrializing areas in Europe and North America became (despite its neglect by writers on imperialist exploitation, such as Lenin, who placed unwarranted stress on the need to export Europe’s surplus capital)”° one of the most frequently cited rationales for imperialist expansion into Africa, southeast Asia, and even heavily populated and extensively cultivated areas such as China. As Thomas Carlyle’s highly charged 1840 essay “Chartism” makes clear, the need to discover and exploit untapped resources was for many writers more than a mere pretext for European conquest and domination of other peoples; it was a moral obligation. Carlyle seethed with indignation over the widespread poverty and unemployment in England when overseas there existed “a world where Canadian Forests stand unfelled, boundless Plains and Prairies unbroken with the plough...green desert spaces never yet made white with corn; and to the overcrowded little western nook of Europe, our Terrestrial Planet, nine-tenths of it yet vacant or tenanted by nomades, is still crying, Come and till me, come and reap me!”’!
I’ll leave it at that. There are quite a few conclusions that I disagree with in this book, but overall it was an excellent read that was endlessly fascinating!
September 12, 2015
A thorough, well-documented account of the West's attitude toward the rest of the world changed over the past 500 years. Initially they viewed them as religiously benighted people who needed the gospel. Then as the industrial revolution and Darwinism flowered, things took a toxic turn, and scientific racism was born. The rest of the world was in varying stages of unfitness, somewhere on the human-animal continuum.
It's funny how everybody thinks there's so much evil in Christianity's past, yet have no idea of the horrors of science's history.
It's funny how everybody thinks there's so much evil in Christianity's past, yet have no idea of the horrors of science's history.
August 31, 2014
. Introduction
1. This book examines ways in which Europeans’ perceptions of the material superiority of their own cultures, particularly as manifested in scientific thought and technological innovation, shaped their attitudes toward and interaction with peoples they encountered overseas
2. The central concerns are the attitudes toward non-Western peoples and cultures and the ways in which these attitudes shaped ideologies of Western dominance and policy-making
3. Emphasis on Britain and France and their dealings with Africa, India, and China
4. The “measure of men” suggests that scientific and technological standards were the basis of establishing the potential of man. The better the machine the more superior the man.
5. “Ideologies of dominance” indicates that science and technology wee sources of Western dominance over African and Asian people
6. This ideology prompted disdain and legitimized ideas of race superiority by Europeans over Africans and Asians.
II. Before the Industrial Revolution
A. First Encounters: Impressions of Material Culture in an Age of Exploration
1. Pre-18th inventiveness and scientific knowledge were rarely stressed as standards by which to judge the development of other societies
2. Merchants and missionaries used Xian faith as the mark of their distinctiveness and superiority
3. Few people who went overseas knew much about science or technology
4. Technology-Perceptions of Backwardness; Qualified Praise
a) Africa: European contempt for African technological capabilities began with description of the wonder the natives showed over the simplest mechanical devices
b) India: The material culture here was impressive. Walled cities, mosques. Gaps in their technological knowledge began to be notices.
c) China: Much praise for the material culture here. The land of the Great Khan. 5. “Natural Philosophy”-Illiteracy and Faulty Calendars
a) Africa: Nonexistent reference to African science. Literacy was viewed as the main attribute of civilized society. Thus, Africans were viewed as ignorant.
b) India: By the end of the 17th European ideas became negative toward Indian science.
c) China: Work with Chinese astronomical calendars were found that many errors occurred.
6. Scientific and Technological Convergence and the 1st Hierarchies of Humankind
a) Travelers began to believe that the Europeans had a fundamentally different view of the world than Africans or Asians
b) Africans and Asians had no machine regulated time sense.
c) Thus, it was differences in material culture (including science and technology) that had the most to do with an emergence of a hierarchy of non-Western individuals
B. The Ascendancy of Science: Shifting Views of Non-Western Peoples in the Enlightenment
1. There was a great deal of curiosity about the exotic non-Western lands
2. The 18th Europeans were confident that their advances in science had surpassed all other nations
3. Technological advancement was far less important than scientific ideas in shaping attitudes towards Africans and Asians
4. Model of Clay: The Rise and Decline of Sinoplilism in Enlightenment Thought
a) No culture was as highly praised as Qing Chine at the beginning of the 18th
b) But, the question began to be asked. How could a people who had progressed so far in other areas of life have achieved so little in astronomy or medicine?
c) By the end of the 18th positive views of China ceased.
d) Condorcet emphasized the roles of science and technology in the human ascent from savagery to civilization. He claimed that the priestly castes (this shows Condorcet’s limited knowledge of China) prevented China from advancing.
5. Ancient Glories, Modern Ruins: The Orientalist Discovery of Indian Learning
a) Just as India reached the nadir of its decline it was “discovered” by the Orientalist
b) The study of Indian scientific learning enhanced India’s standing in the eyes of European thinkers.
c) This was temporary as further inquiry showed stagnation and decline
d) Sonnerat criticized Indian technology, primitive tools and believed the main culprits were despotism
6. African Achievement and the Debate over the Abolition of the Slave Trade
a) Defenders of the slave trade emphasized its economic importance, claimed that African culture was immoral, and that Xianity would help civilize their societies
b) Abolitionists argued that Africans were men and brother, but not necessarily equal. Abolitionists believed that the slave trade was responsible for the sorry state of African culture.
7. Scientific Gauges and the Spirit of the Times
a) Africans were portrayed as unable to think scientifically
III. The Age of Industrialization
A. Global Hegemony and the Rise of Technology as the Main Measure of Human Achievement
1. As industrialization spread travelers became more sensitive to the differences between cultures.
2. Further industrialization by the mid-19th had sealed North American and European dominance
3. Martin Wiener and the idea of decline of the spirit of industrialization. This can be reconciled between technology per se and industrialization in its capitalist guise
4. Africa: Primitive Tools and the Savage Mind
a) The Ganda had skill at road building and metalworking
b) Yet, the savage mind was portrayed in thousands of letters from African travelers
5. India: The Retreat of Orientalism
a) In contrast to numerous accounts that solidified the African view, one author formed decisive influence for Europeans concerning India
b) James Mill, History of British India, he dismissed all Indian achievements and gauged their failure through their lack of scientific and technological skills
c) He became part of the East India Company, where his son John Stuart was also employed
6. China: Despotism and Decline
a) Towards the end of the 18th European awe was transformed into hostility and an urge to remake the country with Western ideals
b) With the Opium War (1839-42) China’s military backwardness was evident
c) Two reasons for their failure to match European scientific advance.
d) First, view of early advance, followed by stagnation then decline. Despotism and veneration for tradition was the culprit for this decline
e) Second, the belief that China's initial scientific advance was due to early Caucasian influence
7. Material Mastery as a Pre-requisite of Civilized Life
a) Mill was one of the earliest to link material advancement to what it meant to be civilized
B. Attributes of the Dominant: Scientific and Technological Foundations of the Civilizing Mission
1. There has been little serious attention given to studying the civilizing mission as an ideology
2. The reason is the ways in which its tenets were propagated in the 19th.
3. Europeans would bring peace and order, and they would be the best rulers for those countries
4. Perceptions of Man and Nature as Gauges of Western Uniqueness and Superiority
a) Western culture began to elevate humans above the rest of nature
b) These were anthropocentric assumptions
c) Julian Virey contrasted the Europeans who were learning how to control nature, with Non-Western people who were living as savages
5. The Machine as Civilizer
a) The RR embodied the great material advances of industrialization
b) This dramatized the gap between Western and non-western people
c) Steamships and trains shown Western mastery over time and space
6. Displacement and Revolution: Marx on the Impact of Machines in Asia
a) Marx believed that colonizers were acting for their own economic gain but their domination would eventually be beneficial to the indigenous people.
7. Time, Work, and Discipline
a) African and Asian deficiencies in keeping time were used as an example of Western superiority
b) Africans used grumbling stomachs to tell time
c) Hindu’s were not punctual or disciplined
8. Space, Accuracy, and Uniformity
a) Europeans believed that they had also mastered space traveling by rail or steamship
9. Worlds Apart: The Case of Ye Ming-chen
a) He was a captive on board a British ship. His indifference to the British military might was taken as an example of the Chinese inability to understand discipline or precision
C. The Limits of Diffusion: Science and Technology in the Debate over African and Asian Capacity for Acculturation
1. Europeans would invent, finance, and command. Africans and Asians would acculturate, labor, and obey
2. This is the conqueror as tutor ideal
3. Despite the fact that 19th century Europeans accepted their S&T superiority but did not necessarily believe that they were racially superior
4. Tautology: S&T achievements were gauges to racial capacity; racial capacity determined the degree of S&T information made available by the West
5. The First Generation of Improvers
a) India: A separate college was founded in Calcutta. There was a fear that too much Western learning would result in a rebellion
b) China: It was believed that China had the capacity to adopt Western thinking
c) Africa: Industrial training was favored over literary learning
6. The Search for Scientific and Technological Proofs of Racial Inequality
a) In the 1800s one of the central preoccupation's was demonstrate that there were innate mental and moral differences between Europeans and Africans and Asians
b) Alfred Wallace explored links between race, technology, and social advance
7. Qualifying the Civilizing Mission: Racists v. Improvers at the Turn of the Century
a) Assimilationists thought instruction in mathematics and sciences were essential
b) The improvers believed French culture should be taught
8. Missing the Main Point: Science and Technology in 19th century Racist Thought
a) Many Europeans were not racist
b) While a majority considered themselves superior to Africans or Asians
IV. The Twentieth Century
A. The Great War and the Assault on Scientific and Technological Measures of Human Worth
1. Some Europeans became troubled with the tendency to judge people based on S&T
2. Many of these criticisms were related to broad anti-industrial sentiments that was beginning to be supported in Britain and France
3. The Specter of Asia Industrialized
a) The emergence of Japan as an industrial power in the period before WWI presented a challenge to the S&T proofs of European superiority
b) Japan’s transformation shattered the belief that industrialization was a uniquely Western process
4. Trench Warfare and the Crisis of Western Civilization
a) Science and Technology did much to create the global war
b) Railways made it possible to move millions of soldiers to battle within days
c) The theme of trench warfare was that humanity was betrayed by trench warfare
d) For those who struggled to survive in the trenches the men had to revert to instinctual drives that were associated with savage peoples
5. Challenges to the Civilizing Mission and the Search for Alternate Measures of Human Worth
a) Some argued that S&T brought on this decline
b) Others believed that a renewed commitment to S&T could allow the reconstruction of the nations
c) George Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant”; the theme here is that the Burmese were in control even though he possessed the rifle
d) Hesse and Malinowski argued that the non-Western world might provide alternatives for Western society
e) In Africa this was attempts to revive the notion of the noble savage
f) Chinese wisdom and reflectiveness could fill the vacuum that European science created
g) Rene Guenon explored Indian alternatives. He believed that science had become too narrow and that we should revert to more metaphysical science. Ex. Aristotle and Asian thinkers
B. Modernization Theory and the Revival of the Technological Standard
1. After the war it became the American’s who knew how to best reform the backward societies
2. After WWI S&T pervaded all aspects of American life. Cars, radios, tvs, refrigerators, etc.
3. Mechanization and modernity became associated
4. In the 70s and 80s modernization theory has come under criticism because it failed to account for the experiences of the peoples in the developing worlds
1. This book examines ways in which Europeans’ perceptions of the material superiority of their own cultures, particularly as manifested in scientific thought and technological innovation, shaped their attitudes toward and interaction with peoples they encountered overseas
2. The central concerns are the attitudes toward non-Western peoples and cultures and the ways in which these attitudes shaped ideologies of Western dominance and policy-making
3. Emphasis on Britain and France and their dealings with Africa, India, and China
4. The “measure of men” suggests that scientific and technological standards were the basis of establishing the potential of man. The better the machine the more superior the man.
5. “Ideologies of dominance” indicates that science and technology wee sources of Western dominance over African and Asian people
6. This ideology prompted disdain and legitimized ideas of race superiority by Europeans over Africans and Asians.
II. Before the Industrial Revolution
A. First Encounters: Impressions of Material Culture in an Age of Exploration
1. Pre-18th inventiveness and scientific knowledge were rarely stressed as standards by which to judge the development of other societies
2. Merchants and missionaries used Xian faith as the mark of their distinctiveness and superiority
3. Few people who went overseas knew much about science or technology
4. Technology-Perceptions of Backwardness; Qualified Praise
a) Africa: European contempt for African technological capabilities began with description of the wonder the natives showed over the simplest mechanical devices
b) India: The material culture here was impressive. Walled cities, mosques. Gaps in their technological knowledge began to be notices.
c) China: Much praise for the material culture here. The land of the Great Khan. 5. “Natural Philosophy”-Illiteracy and Faulty Calendars
a) Africa: Nonexistent reference to African science. Literacy was viewed as the main attribute of civilized society. Thus, Africans were viewed as ignorant.
b) India: By the end of the 17th European ideas became negative toward Indian science.
c) China: Work with Chinese astronomical calendars were found that many errors occurred.
6. Scientific and Technological Convergence and the 1st Hierarchies of Humankind
a) Travelers began to believe that the Europeans had a fundamentally different view of the world than Africans or Asians
b) Africans and Asians had no machine regulated time sense.
c) Thus, it was differences in material culture (including science and technology) that had the most to do with an emergence of a hierarchy of non-Western individuals
B. The Ascendancy of Science: Shifting Views of Non-Western Peoples in the Enlightenment
1. There was a great deal of curiosity about the exotic non-Western lands
2. The 18th Europeans were confident that their advances in science had surpassed all other nations
3. Technological advancement was far less important than scientific ideas in shaping attitudes towards Africans and Asians
4. Model of Clay: The Rise and Decline of Sinoplilism in Enlightenment Thought
a) No culture was as highly praised as Qing Chine at the beginning of the 18th
b) But, the question began to be asked. How could a people who had progressed so far in other areas of life have achieved so little in astronomy or medicine?
c) By the end of the 18th positive views of China ceased.
d) Condorcet emphasized the roles of science and technology in the human ascent from savagery to civilization. He claimed that the priestly castes (this shows Condorcet’s limited knowledge of China) prevented China from advancing.
5. Ancient Glories, Modern Ruins: The Orientalist Discovery of Indian Learning
a) Just as India reached the nadir of its decline it was “discovered” by the Orientalist
b) The study of Indian scientific learning enhanced India’s standing in the eyes of European thinkers.
c) This was temporary as further inquiry showed stagnation and decline
d) Sonnerat criticized Indian technology, primitive tools and believed the main culprits were despotism
6. African Achievement and the Debate over the Abolition of the Slave Trade
a) Defenders of the slave trade emphasized its economic importance, claimed that African culture was immoral, and that Xianity would help civilize their societies
b) Abolitionists argued that Africans were men and brother, but not necessarily equal. Abolitionists believed that the slave trade was responsible for the sorry state of African culture.
7. Scientific Gauges and the Spirit of the Times
a) Africans were portrayed as unable to think scientifically
III. The Age of Industrialization
A. Global Hegemony and the Rise of Technology as the Main Measure of Human Achievement
1. As industrialization spread travelers became more sensitive to the differences between cultures.
2. Further industrialization by the mid-19th had sealed North American and European dominance
3. Martin Wiener and the idea of decline of the spirit of industrialization. This can be reconciled between technology per se and industrialization in its capitalist guise
4. Africa: Primitive Tools and the Savage Mind
a) The Ganda had skill at road building and metalworking
b) Yet, the savage mind was portrayed in thousands of letters from African travelers
5. India: The Retreat of Orientalism
a) In contrast to numerous accounts that solidified the African view, one author formed decisive influence for Europeans concerning India
b) James Mill, History of British India, he dismissed all Indian achievements and gauged their failure through their lack of scientific and technological skills
c) He became part of the East India Company, where his son John Stuart was also employed
6. China: Despotism and Decline
a) Towards the end of the 18th European awe was transformed into hostility and an urge to remake the country with Western ideals
b) With the Opium War (1839-42) China’s military backwardness was evident
c) Two reasons for their failure to match European scientific advance.
d) First, view of early advance, followed by stagnation then decline. Despotism and veneration for tradition was the culprit for this decline
e) Second, the belief that China's initial scientific advance was due to early Caucasian influence
7. Material Mastery as a Pre-requisite of Civilized Life
a) Mill was one of the earliest to link material advancement to what it meant to be civilized
B. Attributes of the Dominant: Scientific and Technological Foundations of the Civilizing Mission
1. There has been little serious attention given to studying the civilizing mission as an ideology
2. The reason is the ways in which its tenets were propagated in the 19th.
3. Europeans would bring peace and order, and they would be the best rulers for those countries
4. Perceptions of Man and Nature as Gauges of Western Uniqueness and Superiority
a) Western culture began to elevate humans above the rest of nature
b) These were anthropocentric assumptions
c) Julian Virey contrasted the Europeans who were learning how to control nature, with Non-Western people who were living as savages
5. The Machine as Civilizer
a) The RR embodied the great material advances of industrialization
b) This dramatized the gap between Western and non-western people
c) Steamships and trains shown Western mastery over time and space
6. Displacement and Revolution: Marx on the Impact of Machines in Asia
a) Marx believed that colonizers were acting for their own economic gain but their domination would eventually be beneficial to the indigenous people.
7. Time, Work, and Discipline
a) African and Asian deficiencies in keeping time were used as an example of Western superiority
b) Africans used grumbling stomachs to tell time
c) Hindu’s were not punctual or disciplined
8. Space, Accuracy, and Uniformity
a) Europeans believed that they had also mastered space traveling by rail or steamship
9. Worlds Apart: The Case of Ye Ming-chen
a) He was a captive on board a British ship. His indifference to the British military might was taken as an example of the Chinese inability to understand discipline or precision
C. The Limits of Diffusion: Science and Technology in the Debate over African and Asian Capacity for Acculturation
1. Europeans would invent, finance, and command. Africans and Asians would acculturate, labor, and obey
2. This is the conqueror as tutor ideal
3. Despite the fact that 19th century Europeans accepted their S&T superiority but did not necessarily believe that they were racially superior
4. Tautology: S&T achievements were gauges to racial capacity; racial capacity determined the degree of S&T information made available by the West
5. The First Generation of Improvers
a) India: A separate college was founded in Calcutta. There was a fear that too much Western learning would result in a rebellion
b) China: It was believed that China had the capacity to adopt Western thinking
c) Africa: Industrial training was favored over literary learning
6. The Search for Scientific and Technological Proofs of Racial Inequality
a) In the 1800s one of the central preoccupation's was demonstrate that there were innate mental and moral differences between Europeans and Africans and Asians
b) Alfred Wallace explored links between race, technology, and social advance
7. Qualifying the Civilizing Mission: Racists v. Improvers at the Turn of the Century
a) Assimilationists thought instruction in mathematics and sciences were essential
b) The improvers believed French culture should be taught
8. Missing the Main Point: Science and Technology in 19th century Racist Thought
a) Many Europeans were not racist
b) While a majority considered themselves superior to Africans or Asians
IV. The Twentieth Century
A. The Great War and the Assault on Scientific and Technological Measures of Human Worth
1. Some Europeans became troubled with the tendency to judge people based on S&T
2. Many of these criticisms were related to broad anti-industrial sentiments that was beginning to be supported in Britain and France
3. The Specter of Asia Industrialized
a) The emergence of Japan as an industrial power in the period before WWI presented a challenge to the S&T proofs of European superiority
b) Japan’s transformation shattered the belief that industrialization was a uniquely Western process
4. Trench Warfare and the Crisis of Western Civilization
a) Science and Technology did much to create the global war
b) Railways made it possible to move millions of soldiers to battle within days
c) The theme of trench warfare was that humanity was betrayed by trench warfare
d) For those who struggled to survive in the trenches the men had to revert to instinctual drives that were associated with savage peoples
5. Challenges to the Civilizing Mission and the Search for Alternate Measures of Human Worth
a) Some argued that S&T brought on this decline
b) Others believed that a renewed commitment to S&T could allow the reconstruction of the nations
c) George Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant”; the theme here is that the Burmese were in control even though he possessed the rifle
d) Hesse and Malinowski argued that the non-Western world might provide alternatives for Western society
e) In Africa this was attempts to revive the notion of the noble savage
f) Chinese wisdom and reflectiveness could fill the vacuum that European science created
g) Rene Guenon explored Indian alternatives. He believed that science had become too narrow and that we should revert to more metaphysical science. Ex. Aristotle and Asian thinkers
B. Modernization Theory and the Revival of the Technological Standard
1. After the war it became the American’s who knew how to best reform the backward societies
2. After WWI S&T pervaded all aspects of American life. Cars, radios, tvs, refrigerators, etc.
3. Mechanization and modernity became associated
4. In the 70s and 80s modernization theory has come under criticism because it failed to account for the experiences of the peoples in the developing worlds
November 24, 2019
Fairly interesting. Didn't read all of it (was for uni), but I'm adding it anyway because it stopped me from reading other things that I wanted to read...
Read
July 27, 2011This is the story of how Europe stopped seeing religion as the measure of civilization and began to see technology as the ultimate yard stick.
Read
July 1, 2020In Machines as the Measure of Men, author Michael Adas traces the history of the connection between technological and scientific advancement and the dominance of the Western world. Although the time periods analyzed by Adas span across several centuries, the overarching theme of the book is that Europe -- and, since the 1800s, North America -- has historically used its own technological innovations and scientific knowledge to establish its superiority over other regions of the world. We can also see that the stereotypes and prejudices that we are well aware of today were both birthed and reinforced by this sense of superiority that Europe maintained over societies that had initially developed on their own terms.
Machines as the Measure of Men details the travels of numerous European men to places like China, India, and sub-Saharan Africa and their observations with regards to local technologies (or the lack thereof). It is in these observations that we begin to see many of the racial stereotypes that persist to this day. Those who ventured to China and India noted that although the two societies did have some technological achievements of their own, they were inferior to the items and ideas produced by Europe. Additionally, the men who traveled to these and other parts of Asia often took issue with the religious and spiritual beliefs professed by the people living there. They saw these "nonsensical" beliefs as a hindrance to the ability of the people of Asia to have technological and academic achievements comparable to those that Europe had used to establish its place in the world.
The historical perception of technology in sub-Saharan Africa is much less positive. Multiple excerpts included in Machines as the Measure of Men suggest the groups living in this region had produced virtually nothing that could be classified as technology and had no scholarly tradition. However, several of the adventurers featured by Adas do make note of Africans' skill at using European-produced items such as firearms. This adaptability led them to see Africans as having the "potential" to be on par with other races. These decades- and centuries-old views are reflected in the common imagination of sub-Saharan Africa today. Despite the fact that many African countries have been seeing unprecedented economic and technological growth over the past several years, the Global North continues to see the region as a place that is in desperate need of our used electronics rather than a place that has its own creations and knowledge to share with the world.
Unsurprisingly, the attitudes held by Western countries with regards to technology and the Global South have changed little since the years that followed World War I, the last era discussed by Adas. We continue to see Europe and North America as the primary producers of various technologies, even though other countries are home to their own share of tools and electronics that we use everyday. Furthermore, Western countries -- particularly those that are predominantly English-speaking -- continue to decide the ways in which new technologies ought to be used. The Internet is a prime example of this. One of the more idealistic interpretations of the Internet's role in our world suggests that it is a tool that connects people and and disseminates ideas from all corners of the globe. While I would very much like to think that the Internet has been able to introduce people to ideas that they might not have known about otherwise, the reality is that English is the most commonly used language on the Internet. Therefore, it is those ideas that are produced by English speakers that are digested by people across the world. Although it has definitely become easier to find material in a limited number of other languages since the 1990s, people who speak English as a second, third, etc. language or not at all continue to be at a disadvantage when it comes to locating information online in their native language. The dominance of the English language and its particular ideas on the Internet is simply a reiteration of that Europe established over other regions in the fields of technology and science. Has the Internet really given everyone equal access to share their unique thoughts with people they would never encounter otherwise? What is taken away from us when the information and ideas published online are limited to English and a small number of other languages?
Machines as the Measure of Men details the travels of numerous European men to places like China, India, and sub-Saharan Africa and their observations with regards to local technologies (or the lack thereof). It is in these observations that we begin to see many of the racial stereotypes that persist to this day. Those who ventured to China and India noted that although the two societies did have some technological achievements of their own, they were inferior to the items and ideas produced by Europe. Additionally, the men who traveled to these and other parts of Asia often took issue with the religious and spiritual beliefs professed by the people living there. They saw these "nonsensical" beliefs as a hindrance to the ability of the people of Asia to have technological and academic achievements comparable to those that Europe had used to establish its place in the world.
The historical perception of technology in sub-Saharan Africa is much less positive. Multiple excerpts included in Machines as the Measure of Men suggest the groups living in this region had produced virtually nothing that could be classified as technology and had no scholarly tradition. However, several of the adventurers featured by Adas do make note of Africans' skill at using European-produced items such as firearms. This adaptability led them to see Africans as having the "potential" to be on par with other races. These decades- and centuries-old views are reflected in the common imagination of sub-Saharan Africa today. Despite the fact that many African countries have been seeing unprecedented economic and technological growth over the past several years, the Global North continues to see the region as a place that is in desperate need of our used electronics rather than a place that has its own creations and knowledge to share with the world.
Unsurprisingly, the attitudes held by Western countries with regards to technology and the Global South have changed little since the years that followed World War I, the last era discussed by Adas. We continue to see Europe and North America as the primary producers of various technologies, even though other countries are home to their own share of tools and electronics that we use everyday. Furthermore, Western countries -- particularly those that are predominantly English-speaking -- continue to decide the ways in which new technologies ought to be used. The Internet is a prime example of this. One of the more idealistic interpretations of the Internet's role in our world suggests that it is a tool that connects people and and disseminates ideas from all corners of the globe. While I would very much like to think that the Internet has been able to introduce people to ideas that they might not have known about otherwise, the reality is that English is the most commonly used language on the Internet. Therefore, it is those ideas that are produced by English speakers that are digested by people across the world. Although it has definitely become easier to find material in a limited number of other languages since the 1990s, people who speak English as a second, third, etc. language or not at all continue to be at a disadvantage when it comes to locating information online in their native language. The dominance of the English language and its particular ideas on the Internet is simply a reiteration of that Europe established over other regions in the fields of technology and science. Has the Internet really given everyone equal access to share their unique thoughts with people they would never encounter otherwise? What is taken away from us when the information and ideas published online are limited to English and a small number of other languages?
March 30, 2016
- Nonetheless, from the 1780s in Britain there was an acceleration in the pace of invention and, perhaps even more critically, an increasing application of new inventions and earlier advances-- in engineering to mineral extraction, manufacturing, and transportation.
- Arthur Young
- European observers came to view science and especially technology as
the most objective and unassailable measures of their own civilization's
past achievement and present worth.
- John Stuart Mill best expressed
the sense of a large majority of the English middle class that machines
had provided the means for the progressive improvement of humanity.
- Some Britons, of course, were a good deal less enthusiastic about the
effects of industrialization: Critics as diverse as Robert Owen and
William Blake, Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell drew attention to
the pollution of the factory towns and the miserable condition of the
workers whose ranks, particularly in textile mills, included a high proportion
of women and children in the early industrial era.
- Tories is a political party
- distinction between technological accomplishments and
abuses caused' by defects in the political and social systems into which
machines were introduced.
- Smith informs his abject cousin that the technological advances
of the British are "signs that we are, on some points at least, in
harmony with the universe; that there is a mighty spirit working among
us, who cannot be your anarchic and destroying Devil, and therefore
must be the Ordering and Creating God".
- The Germans and
French also solidified the links between science and industrial production
through the establishment of a network of state-supported polytechnical
schools-a pattern that the British adopted only belatedly and
for the most part grudgingly.
- Increasingly industrialized European (and North American) cultures as a
whole were seen to be a separate class, distinct from all others.
- Most nineteenth-century observers mixed nontechnological or nonscientific
gauges-systems of government, ethical codes, treatment of
women, religious practices, and so on-with assessments of African and
Asian material mastery.
- Thus,
unlike earlier gauges by which the Europeans compared societies, those
favored in the nineteenth century were believed to be amenable to empirical
verification and were especially suited to the late Victorian penchant
for "statistical reductiveness.
- Because nineteenth-century Europeans believed that machines, skull
size, or ideas about the configuration of the solar system were culturally
neutral facts, evaluative criteria based on science and technology appeared
to be the least tainted by subjective bias.
- black Africans were incapable of the architectual,
engineering, and stoneworking feats that those who built the great walls
and towers of Zimbabwe had obviously possessed
- Orientalism: is a term used by art historians, literary, geographers, and cultural studies scholars for the imitation or depiction of aspects in Middle Eastern, South Asian, African and East Asian cultures
- Barrow ridiculed the Chinese for their unbearably arrogant supposition
that foreigners had little to offer the Middle Kingdom. He pointed
out that they had borrowed heavily in both the sciences and technology
in recent centuries. He stressed the role of the Jesuits in transmitting
knowledge and inventions from the West and noted that the emperor
was dependent on them for accurate calendars and clocks and effective
artillery pieces. Barrow saw this dependence as a symptom of China's
general backwardness and evidence o( the degree to which it had fallen
behind the West: "They can be said to be great in trifles, whilst they are
really trifling in everything that is great."
- Each aspired in particular to
acceptance by the intellectual establishment of his respective society.
Each sought acclaim as an authority: Millon India and issues of political
economy more generally; Barrow on China; Le Bon' on a multitude
of subjects from phrenology and mass psychology to India and
Arabia.
- But now they were more
acutely aware of the unprecedented nature of the power and material
wealth that the Europeans' unique scientific and technological advances
had generated. Now they more often saw these advances as the source
of Europe's global dominion, as standards by which to measure the
accomplishments of others against those of Europe, and as prerequisites
for civilized life as they had come to define it.
- By century's end,
science and technology had become "mirror-image twins": one oriented
to experiment, theory, and knowing; the other to application, design,
and doing; but both joined in a systematic endeavor to uncover the
secrets and harness the energies of the natural world.
- Blatantly narcissistic
gauges of the worth of non-European peoples-skin color, fashions in
or lack of clothing-receded in importance; measurements of cranial
capacity, estimates of railway mileage, and the capacity for work, discipline,
and marking time became the decisive criteria by which Europeans
judged other cultures and celebrated the superiority of their own.
The fact that these criteria were as culturebound as earlier gauges and
even more loaded in favor of the industrializing West was grasped by
only a handful of intellectuals.
- these values started to become quantified.
- the superiority was always there, but now they have a reason why.
- Global Hegemony: hegemony is the political, economic, or military predominance or control of one state over others.
- the way in which power works in the level of ideology.
- Consent of the subordinated.
- Europeans are justifying they are better because they have this technology. Moves from civilization coming from technology.
- Technology is a determination for how industrialized a country is. Then they use it to measure differences.
- Increasingly industrialized European (and North American) cultures as a
whole were seen to be a separate class, distinct from all others. The
polarities were numerous and obvious: metal versus wood; machine
versus human or animal power; science versus superstition and myth;
synthetic versus organic; progressive versus stagnant. (144).
- Perceived objectivity of science.
- pre this idea of technology and that as the measure of man: Smith informs his abject cousin that the technological advances
of the British are "signs that we are, on some points at least, in
harmony with the universe; that there is a mighty spirit working among
us, who cannot be your anarchic and destroying Devil, and therefore
must be the Ordering and Creating God.
- religion was how people measured a society and men in that society
- African/Indian/Chinese societies:
- India:
- discussions on how much things have not changed over the last thousand years.
- Stagnation of Indian technological development.
- Although Mill had no firsthand experience of India-a fact he noted
proudly because he believed that it heightened his capacity for objectivity-
as preparation for the writing of his six-volume magnum opus
he had spent many years reading whatever works on the subcontinent
were available. (166).
- He commented explicitly on deficiencies in
Indian science and technology, which he linked to overall defects in
Hindu civilization. He conceded that the Indians had made advances in a
variety cifforms of handicraft manufacture, but like Sonnerat he argued
that these had been achieved in an age long past and that there had been
little improvement in Indian techniques in thousands of years. (167).
- He argued
that the Indians were ignorant of the natural sciences and that "invention
seems wholly torpid among them." (167).
- Ward declared categorically that
the Hindus knew "nothing" of anatomy, surgery, chemistry, pharmacy,
physics, and botany; that their geography was "wholly false";
and that they were "very imperfectly acquainted" with mathematics. He
conceded that the Hindus had once made discoveries in astronomy and
had some medical knowledge, but even in these fields, he added, their
knowledge had long since stagnated, and they were centuries behind the
Europeans. (168)
- "Orientalists, those writers who disagreed
with Mill's contention that India had failed to rise above barbarism to
civilization invariably stressed India's past achievements and contrasted
them with its current backwardness relative to advanced European
state. (173).
- Africa:
- Devoid of scientific
- Unable to create scientific works
- Africans were seen as biologically close to Europeans past
- Primitives versions of the Europeans
- They were not at war with each other. They did not see an internal conflict.
- Primitive collective: the individual does not speak.
- The notion of a collective is backwards.
- The individual as prime, and the collective as pre-modern.
- Europeans justify these lands as unproductive land.
- Edward Said: Orientalism. Construction of knowledge of the non-west by the west.
- Arthur Young
- European observers came to view science and especially technology as
the most objective and unassailable measures of their own civilization's
past achievement and present worth.
- John Stuart Mill best expressed
the sense of a large majority of the English middle class that machines
had provided the means for the progressive improvement of humanity.
- Some Britons, of course, were a good deal less enthusiastic about the
effects of industrialization: Critics as diverse as Robert Owen and
William Blake, Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell drew attention to
the pollution of the factory towns and the miserable condition of the
workers whose ranks, particularly in textile mills, included a high proportion
of women and children in the early industrial era.
- Tories is a political party
- distinction between technological accomplishments and
abuses caused' by defects in the political and social systems into which
machines were introduced.
- Smith informs his abject cousin that the technological advances
of the British are "signs that we are, on some points at least, in
harmony with the universe; that there is a mighty spirit working among
us, who cannot be your anarchic and destroying Devil, and therefore
must be the Ordering and Creating God".
- The Germans and
French also solidified the links between science and industrial production
through the establishment of a network of state-supported polytechnical
schools-a pattern that the British adopted only belatedly and
for the most part grudgingly.
- Increasingly industrialized European (and North American) cultures as a
whole were seen to be a separate class, distinct from all others.
- Most nineteenth-century observers mixed nontechnological or nonscientific
gauges-systems of government, ethical codes, treatment of
women, religious practices, and so on-with assessments of African and
Asian material mastery.
- Thus,
unlike earlier gauges by which the Europeans compared societies, those
favored in the nineteenth century were believed to be amenable to empirical
verification and were especially suited to the late Victorian penchant
for "statistical reductiveness.
- Because nineteenth-century Europeans believed that machines, skull
size, or ideas about the configuration of the solar system were culturally
neutral facts, evaluative criteria based on science and technology appeared
to be the least tainted by subjective bias.
- black Africans were incapable of the architectual,
engineering, and stoneworking feats that those who built the great walls
and towers of Zimbabwe had obviously possessed
- Orientalism: is a term used by art historians, literary, geographers, and cultural studies scholars for the imitation or depiction of aspects in Middle Eastern, South Asian, African and East Asian cultures
- Barrow ridiculed the Chinese for their unbearably arrogant supposition
that foreigners had little to offer the Middle Kingdom. He pointed
out that they had borrowed heavily in both the sciences and technology
in recent centuries. He stressed the role of the Jesuits in transmitting
knowledge and inventions from the West and noted that the emperor
was dependent on them for accurate calendars and clocks and effective
artillery pieces. Barrow saw this dependence as a symptom of China's
general backwardness and evidence o( the degree to which it had fallen
behind the West: "They can be said to be great in trifles, whilst they are
really trifling in everything that is great."
- Each aspired in particular to
acceptance by the intellectual establishment of his respective society.
Each sought acclaim as an authority: Millon India and issues of political
economy more generally; Barrow on China; Le Bon' on a multitude
of subjects from phrenology and mass psychology to India and
Arabia.
- But now they were more
acutely aware of the unprecedented nature of the power and material
wealth that the Europeans' unique scientific and technological advances
had generated. Now they more often saw these advances as the source
of Europe's global dominion, as standards by which to measure the
accomplishments of others against those of Europe, and as prerequisites
for civilized life as they had come to define it.
- By century's end,
science and technology had become "mirror-image twins": one oriented
to experiment, theory, and knowing; the other to application, design,
and doing; but both joined in a systematic endeavor to uncover the
secrets and harness the energies of the natural world.
- Blatantly narcissistic
gauges of the worth of non-European peoples-skin color, fashions in
or lack of clothing-receded in importance; measurements of cranial
capacity, estimates of railway mileage, and the capacity for work, discipline,
and marking time became the decisive criteria by which Europeans
judged other cultures and celebrated the superiority of their own.
The fact that these criteria were as culturebound as earlier gauges and
even more loaded in favor of the industrializing West was grasped by
only a handful of intellectuals.
- these values started to become quantified.
- the superiority was always there, but now they have a reason why.
- Global Hegemony: hegemony is the political, economic, or military predominance or control of one state over others.
- the way in which power works in the level of ideology.
- Consent of the subordinated.
- Europeans are justifying they are better because they have this technology. Moves from civilization coming from technology.
- Technology is a determination for how industrialized a country is. Then they use it to measure differences.
- Increasingly industrialized European (and North American) cultures as a
whole were seen to be a separate class, distinct from all others. The
polarities were numerous and obvious: metal versus wood; machine
versus human or animal power; science versus superstition and myth;
synthetic versus organic; progressive versus stagnant. (144).
- Perceived objectivity of science.
- pre this idea of technology and that as the measure of man: Smith informs his abject cousin that the technological advances
of the British are "signs that we are, on some points at least, in
harmony with the universe; that there is a mighty spirit working among
us, who cannot be your anarchic and destroying Devil, and therefore
must be the Ordering and Creating God.
- religion was how people measured a society and men in that society
- African/Indian/Chinese societies:
- India:
- discussions on how much things have not changed over the last thousand years.
- Stagnation of Indian technological development.
- Although Mill had no firsthand experience of India-a fact he noted
proudly because he believed that it heightened his capacity for objectivity-
as preparation for the writing of his six-volume magnum opus
he had spent many years reading whatever works on the subcontinent
were available. (166).
- He commented explicitly on deficiencies in
Indian science and technology, which he linked to overall defects in
Hindu civilization. He conceded that the Indians had made advances in a
variety cifforms of handicraft manufacture, but like Sonnerat he argued
that these had been achieved in an age long past and that there had been
little improvement in Indian techniques in thousands of years. (167).
- He argued
that the Indians were ignorant of the natural sciences and that "invention
seems wholly torpid among them." (167).
- Ward declared categorically that
the Hindus knew "nothing" of anatomy, surgery, chemistry, pharmacy,
physics, and botany; that their geography was "wholly false";
and that they were "very imperfectly acquainted" with mathematics. He
conceded that the Hindus had once made discoveries in astronomy and
had some medical knowledge, but even in these fields, he added, their
knowledge had long since stagnated, and they were centuries behind the
Europeans. (168)
- "Orientalists, those writers who disagreed
with Mill's contention that India had failed to rise above barbarism to
civilization invariably stressed India's past achievements and contrasted
them with its current backwardness relative to advanced European
state. (173).
- Africa:
- Devoid of scientific
- Unable to create scientific works
- Africans were seen as biologically close to Europeans past
- Primitives versions of the Europeans
- They were not at war with each other. They did not see an internal conflict.
- Primitive collective: the individual does not speak.
- The notion of a collective is backwards.
- The individual as prime, and the collective as pre-modern.
- Europeans justify these lands as unproductive land.
- Edward Said: Orientalism. Construction of knowledge of the non-west by the west.
January 6, 2014
Essential reading to understand how European conceptions of civilizational progress focused on scientific and technological achievement as measures of civilizational advance, and by consequence how legitimation of European superiority biased and shaped assessments of non-Western science and technology. Heavy on the evidence so it isn't a popular page turner, but it is quite important. Also, it's interesting to read echoes of things we see on Economist covers today in the 18th century somewhat racist rantings of James Mill.
September 14, 2013
Just a first-rate intellectual history covering the emergence and then decline of the use of technology as a measuring stick for Europe's progress and belief in its own superiority. Also provides a useful corrective to narratives that reduce the entire story to racism (which, Adas argues persuasively, is secondary to less explicit forms of cultural chauvinism throughout much of the past few centuries).
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