Dominance by Design: Technological Imperatives and America's Civilizing Mission

by Michael B. Adas

Long before the United States became a major force in global affairs, Americans believed in their superiority over others due to their inventiveness, productivity, and economic and social well-being. U.S. expansionists assumed a mandate to “civilize” non-Western peoples by demanding submission to American technological prowess and design. As an integral part of America’s national identity and sense of itself in the world, this civilizing mission provided the rationale to displace the Indians from much of our continent, to build an island empire in the Pacific and Caribbean, and to promote unilateral—at times military—interventionism throughout Asia. In our age of “smart bombs” and mobile warfare, technological aptitude remains preeminent in validating America’s global mission. Michael Adas brilliantly pursues the history of this mission through America's foreign relations over nearly four centuries from North America to the Philippines, Vietnam, and the Persian Gulf. The belief that it is our right and destiny to remake foreign societies in our image has endured from the early decades of colonization to our current crusade to implant American-style democracy in the Muslim Middle East. Dominance by Design explores the critical ways in which technological superiority has undergirded the U.S.’s policies of unilateralism, preemption, and interventionism in foreign affairs and raised us from an impoverished frontier nation to a global power. Challenging the long-held assumptions and imperatives that sustain the civilizing mission, Adas gives us an essential guide to America’s past and present role in the world as well as cautionary lessons for the future.

Genres: History

480 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Michael 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.

Reviews

[JC · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book for comps, and it was one of the books I faltered on in terms of questions from my committee. I admittedly read it very quickly, and I was very preoccupied with different parts of the book than the professor was who asked me about this text.

The opening story about Matthew Perry in the mid-19th century marching over a hundred naval officers towards the Japanese 'emperor' to show off various American technological spectacles was a very interesting story that I was actually not familiar with before reading this book. Following this, the book then proceeds to analyze the role technological prowess had on American colonization of Indigenous lands, its deployment in civilizing efforts among Anglo-Americans (Chapter 1). Next, the book traces American Pacific expansion into China and Japan (Chapter 2), before tracing colonial interventions in the Philippines and Caribbean (Chapter 3-4).

Next, the book sketches out the post-WW2 period in its second half. The book argues that the spectacle of technological prowess was used as a means of asserting American imperial dominance and control over other countries, both at a pragmatic and a symbolic level. This remains an extremely relevant geopolitical issue, especially as other global poles of technological prowess emerge. I was especially fascinated by Adas’ analysis of how this dynamic fit into the decades of the Cold War, taken up in Chapter 5:

“The second half of the book is devoted to the half-century after the Second World War, when the United States became first a superpower and then, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the global hegemon. The centrality of technological achievement and material prosperity in shaping the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union for influence in the emerging nations is explored in Chapter 5 on the deployment of modernization theory as an antidote to Marxist socialism and converging approaches to development assistance in the postcolonial world.”

As might be evident, this book speaks to the emergence of international development theory, particularly how it emerged to counteract Marxist theories of development. After this chapter (which covers interesting materials, but discusses Marxism in annoying way), the book details American military adventures in Vietnam (Chapter 6), and after, the Persian Gulf war of 1990-1991 (Chapter 7).

Overall the book offers a scathing critique of American imperialism and military violence, particularly the legacy of American capitalism during the Cold War. Its analysis of the Soviet Union, the Peoples’ Republic of China, and Marxism more broadly was of mixed merit in my view. Adas seems unnecessarily antagonistic to really-existing socialism at times. I only agreed with some of his assessment in this respect, and mostly disagree with the sort of rhetoric he deploys, using terms like genocidal in ways that I think many respectable and less-than-radical scholars would disagree with (I am by no means talking about Stalinists here). The only political project Adas seemed uncritically sympathetic to is small-is-beautiful Ghandian appropriate technology, which I was quite taken with as a master’s student, but am a lot more critical of now. I think Langdon Winner offers some valuable critiques of this movement in his book the Whale and the Reactor, but I think Marxism more broadly does also. I suppose I am a bit of a 'modernist' in that respect, while Adas does not quite seem to be.

The most valuable part of this book for me was the abundance of empirical sources and material that underscore American militarism and imperialism. I will finish with a few excerpts below. The first is a comment about the threat that American colonizers associated with forests:

“At least since medieval times, Europeans had usually represented heavily forested regions as dark, overgrown, and disordered spaces whose crude human inhabitants were prone to melancholy, isolation, and rough living. Woodlands were seen as places of danger, where wild beasts prowled and bandits and legendary wild men lay in wait for travelers or those who strayed too far from settled areas. These associations are underscored by the derivation of the concept of savagery from the Latin word silva, which referred to a wooded area.”

Colonizers also recognized the tactical use of forests in Indigenous warfare:

“The Ind*ans’ approach to battle was often perceived as involving a cowardly reliance on ambushes and surprise assaults. Here again the Amerindians’ ingenuity in making use of the forest and other forms of natural cover was usually reported as evidence of unmanly and treacherous temperaments rather than as effective exploitation of the environment.”

This is interesting context for a later section that covers the huge deforestation that occurred in Vietnam through the use of agent orange:

“When high-tech assaults on suspected guerrilla bases and supportive villages proved indecisive at best, U.S. counterinsurgency operations were escalated to a level of warfare that had never before been pursued in such a deliberate, sustained, and routinized manner. Innovative ways of harnessing scientific research and new technology made it possible to wage war on the very environment of South Vietnam, which was so amenable to guerrilla tactics. Research by Dow Chemical and other American corporate giants led to the development of a variety of defoliants and herbicides, of which the most widely employed was agent orange. These chemical concoctions were used to deplete the rainforest cover of areas considered major NLF sanctuaries. By the late 1960s as much as 25 percent of South Vietnam’s highland rainforests, mangrove wetlands in the Mekong Delta, and large swaths of woodland along the Cambodian border had been defoliated. Toxic spraying devastated wildlife, fish and shellfish industries, and Vietnam’s hardwood logging industry, which in the French period had become a significant export sector. The slogan adopted by the helicopter crews assigned to spraying operations—“Only we can prevent forests”—was, in its subversion of the virtuous adage of the U.S. forest service’s Smokey the Bear, an example of the black humor that American combat troops used to cope with the violation of personal morality that was virtually inescapable for those engaged in counterinsurgency operations. It was also a disturbing reminder of the moral numbing that has invariably been associated with those participating in technowar.

In the more densely populated lowlands, some 5 million acres— or roughly 10 percent of the cultivated area of South Vietnam—were sterilized by repeated chemical spraying. Peasants living in affected areas and soldiers on all sides of the conflict operating there, as well as the U.S. military personnel who carried out the herbicidal campaign, experienced high rates of cancer and contracted respiratory and nervous disorders associated with the chemicals. And such afflictions have persisted through the decades since the end of the war.73 An additional area the size of Connecticut was rendered incapable of food production by the craterization caused by bombing. The large ponds that formed in the bomb craters in the monsoon season were ideal breeding grounds for malarial mosquitoes. Rats, which thrived in the garbage dumps near American military bases and the fortified hamlets, were the carriers of a rabies epidemic in the late 1960s. A region that had once been one of the great rice-producing and -exporting centers of Asia was importing hundreds of millions of tons of rice by the mid-1960s. Even then the maldistribution of the imported rice, coupled with food shortages in areas where bombing and chemical spraying were concentrated, resulted in widespread brain damage or kwashiorkor among malnourished children.

By 1970 American and U.N. observers estimated that the counter-insurgency war was claiming six civilian casualties for every guerrilla. And of the civilians killed or maimed, four out of ten were children, which meant that a quarter of a million South Vietnamese under the age of sixteen had died of combat-related causes during the American phase of the war and over a million had been wounded.74 All this devastation was being inflicted on the people and the land that U.S. policymakers insisted they were trying to save from the evils of communist domination.”

Adas makes an interesting connection between colonial condescension to Indigenous peoples and colonial patriarchy:

“Perhaps no aspect of Indian agricultural practices elicited more disdainful English responses than the fact that in Amerindian societies cultivation was overwhelmingly women’s work.”

This was an interesting comment on American views of East Asia:

“But in contrast to the British philosopher, who viewed Greece as the original home of civilization, American expansionists favored China and Japan. They envisioned the ancient lands of East Asia as the ultimate destination of the moving frontier that would both join the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and provide the resources and impetus for America’s mission to revitalize the decadent civilizations of the Old World.”

There was also a really important comment about watermills, which Adas claims was the preeminent source of power for processing agricultural commodities, lumber, and textiles (and not steam even as the Industrial Revolution was in full swing:

“The success of these early forays into the diverse ecosystems of the frontiers often depended on handcrafted implements and pre-industrial machinery. Watermills, for example, remained the preeminent source of power for processing agricultural produce, turning timber into lumber, and manufacturing textiles until the mid-nineteenth century. The superb American axe, which colonists along the Atlantic had wielded to clear land and transform forests into exports, remained a critical tool both for settlers in the upper Midwest and on the great plains and for those engaged in the lumber industry that flourished first in the Great Lakes region and later in the Pacific Northwest. Single-bitted axes were not replaced by long-handled, double-bitted ones and steel crosscut saws until the 1870s.”

Despite the pre-eminence of hydropower in these industries, Adas also mentions that steam was also vital to deforestation (lumbering was the largest US industry by gross sales by the 1870s):

“Advances in iron-working for locks facilitated the construction of canals that linked newly settled areas with steamboat carriers on the Mississippi and centers of commerce and industry on the Great Lakes and on the Atlantic coast. Steam engines drove mechanized “donkeys” that skidded cut timber to rivers and railway lines that carried it to steam-powered sawmills where it was sawed into lumber. New technologies enabled logging companies to deplete within decades forests in the upper Midwest and the Pacific Northwest more extensive than those in the Atlantic colonies that had taken centuries to clear. By the 1870s lumbering was the nation’s largest industry in terms of gross sales. Steam-powered machines drained western mines and carted the ores to railway junctions where they were transferred to trains that carried them to the smelters and rolling mills of the Midwest and the East.”

The bloodshed of American colonization of the Philippines was also described rather well by Adas:

“The four-year “insurrection” that followed resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Filipino soldiers and more than 700,000 civilians. The latter perished mainly as a result of epidemic diseases spread by the warring parties; the destruction of crops, farm implements, and housing; and direct assaults by American units on villagers, especially during the later guerrilla phase of the conflict. Over 4,000 United States soldiers were killed in military campaigns to crush Filipino resistance, which drained hundreds of millions of dollars from the American treasury. Particularly on Luzon and several of the Visayan islands, where the fighting was concentrated, the war also took a heavy toll on the communications infrastructure, which had already been heavily damaged in the struggle to oust the Spanish, the islands’ original colonial overlords.”

The central role of engineers to American colonialism in the Philippines was also particular interesting:

“Although none of the early governors was an engineer, members of the profession pervaded all other levels of colonial administration. From the time of the shift to civilian government in 1901, it was stipulated that the supervisors of the colony’s twenty-seven provinces must be civil engineers. The engineer-supervisors were thus pivotal members of the three-person boards in charge of the day-to-day administration of the provinces. Engineers were also in charge of the land revenue and geological surveys, the mapping expeditions, and the public works projects aimed at rationalizing space across the islands, sorting out property claims, and assessing the colony’s resources. In addition, they served on the provincial boards of health. In that capacity, engineers emerged as key strategists in the medical campaigns against the succession of epidemics that struck the Philippines in the first years of American rule. An engineer also headed the committee appointed to investigate the potential of the Baguio area as the site of a hill station where the colonists could vacation and escape the coastal heat. There were never enough engineers to staff all the positions assigned to them, a situation which in part accounted for the high salaries and other special incentives offered to recruits from the United States. The shortage of engineers is a recurring concern in the many letters written by Taft in his years as governor urging prominent friends back home to nominate qualified young men for engineering posts in the Philippines.”

The concluding paragraph to the Philippines chapter was also interesting:

“Warnings that the compradores might monopolize political power and enhance their domination of the inequitable socioeconomic system had been voiced by American officials, such as Schurman and Taft, from the early days of commission government. Nonetheless, in their rhetoric as least, colonial policymakers remained confident that more machines, better roads, and mass education would in time avert this outcome and render the colonial experiment a resounding success. In fact, however, material increase without social reform exacerbated the divisions and tensions within Filipino society. Persisting undercurrents of peasant resistance were channeled into local uprisings, quasi-millenarian religious movements, and endemic everyday and avoidance protest. If there was any doubt that America’s mission to bequeath its developmental brand of civilization to the Philippines had fallen far short of its stated goals, it would be clearly resolved by the revolutionary struggles of the decade after the Second World War and the intensifying civil strife that culminated in the overthrow of the Marcos regime in the mid-1980s.”

[Brian · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book attempts to look at the course of American history from the colonial days through the gulf war. There are times when this book comes close to achieving its goal but most of the time it is a very general overview that is lacking in points. The technology described does not seem to relate to what the author wants to talk about and the argument comes out fairly week. This is a book that should be able to hold the readers interest with how fascinating an idea of how technology made America a superpower. While this premise is true it is not shown through this book. Furthermore there are severe typos that actually make it hard to understand at times.

The second half of the book is where the argument really begins to fall apart. The analysis of Vietnam comes close to understanding how unprepared the United States was for guerrilla warfare but Adas demonstrates ignorance of the larger issues of the cold war. The entire buildup under Reagan is absent from the book. The place where the book should really have stopped was at the analysis of the Gulf War. There is no understanding of the global oil market and it actually went as far to state that Saddam improved condition of Iraq for the people there. While ignoring death camps for Kurds and mass graves were occurring we see Saddam in a supposed good light. The terrorist attacks on the United States are even worse in their portrayal. The understanding of response to Bin Laden and his lack of research on the 1990's terrorist attacks is abysmal. Please see the 9/11 commission report for an actual understanding of how terrorism was evolving in the 1990's. This book is barely worth one star. Just disappointing.

[Tiffany · Rating 5 out of 5]

Adas discusses the role of technology and America’s unflagging faith in their technological in American imperialism.