BOOK REVIEWS f General Michael Adas. Dominance by Design: Techno- logical Imperatives and America’s Civilizing Mission. 542 pp., illus., notes, index. Cam- bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006. $29.95 (cloth). With Dominance by Design, Michael Adas pro- vides us with an impressive and broadly written study that documents American attitudes toward colonial expansion, imperialism, and overseas intervention from the seventeenth century to the present. Adas successfully brings together these disparate literatures in American history through a sustained focus on technology. He describes the role that American technological prowess played in this nation’s take on the “white man’s burden,” which in turn justified everything from the historical treatment of Native Americans to our latest interventions in Iraq. Lucidly written, this book, which appears as a Belknap imprint, is designed for a broad historical audience. It demonstrates as well the relevance of the history of technology to the broadest currents in Amer- ican history. As is typical of works in this genre—think of Civil War or Cold War histo- ries—Dominance by Design is written with a political purpose. The book is an unabashed plea to recognize that present-day foreign policies have deep roots in American attitudes and ex- perience and that our insistence on exporting capitalism and democracy through technological and military strategies is bound only to fuel global tensions. The book itself has a highly linear, if not teleological, design that aims to describe the successive articulations of the “civilizing mis- sion” that derived from a sense of technological progress and social superiority that were integral to the American experience. It opens with an account of Commodore Perry’s infamous “black ships” that contributed to the opening of Japan. In carefully documenting the attention Perry paid to making technology an instrument of di- plomacy, Adas is able to cast the event in a synecdochic relation to the book as a whole. He then goes on to describe the origins of the Amer- ican faith in technology and the commitment to internal improvement— of nature and of other races—in the religious and racial attitudes of the early settlers. Adas next documents the transmu- tation of the Protestant doctrine of internal im- provement under the ruthless logic of Manifest Destiny, its subsequent translation into a for- mula for foreign development in the Philippines, the further extension and articulation of this formula in Panama and elsewhere (including China and Japan), and its reincarnation as offi- cial development discourse during the early Cold War era. The chapter that follows docu- ments how these development policies, when merged with Cold War fears, orientalism, and a technocratic mind-set, produced the human trag- edy in Vietnam. Next comes a chapter on the “technowar” of the first Gulf War. Although Adas applauds the multilateralism of George H. W. Bush and accepts the Gulf War’s high- tech weaponry as a successful manifestation of the technologies that had failed during Vietnam, he nevertheless points to the limitations of a predominantly militarized approach to foreign intervention. This is followed by an “epilogue” that casts the current War on Terrorism as a predictable retrenchment of U.S. foreign policy into an older unilateralist position, one still backed by a faith in technology and democratic institutions that has little bearing on the experi- ence of other nations and other cultures. Before proceeding any further, it is necessary for me to remark that I am a specialist neither in American history nor in imperialism and post- colonial history and theory, and therefore it is difficult for me to judge to what extent Adas offers important correctives to established inter- pretations of American expansionism, writ large. This said, the book offers substantial ev- idence of the social and ideological continuities that exist between the American experiences of colonialism, westward expansion, imperialism, international development policy, foreign pol- icy, and military strategy, all of which, as noted above, tend to be treated as separate subjects in American history. In terms of the history of technology, Adas’s references to and integration of the literature are quite impressive. He in- cludes Carolyn Merchant and William Cronon’s work on Western and colonial attitudes toward natural improvements; the early economic his- torical studies on U.S. resource advantages; a deft reapplication of Leo Marx’s metaphor of the machine in the garden; the literature on the American system of manufactures; and more recent literatures on consumer culture, gender and technology, and Cold War technologies. From the standpoint of the history of science, some readers will find the book to contain un- opened doors and missed opportunities. For ex- ample, in discussing the U.S. imperialist expan- 154 brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by Caltech Authors