Dominance by Design

If only I could send two or three thousand choice subjects to a "re-education camp" consisting entirely of a close reading of Adas's Dominance by Design, a sweeping, powerful indictment of American technological hubris from the first European settlers to the Gulf Wars. -- James C. Scott, Yale University Adas has identified the leitmotif of American empire: not democracy, globalization, or "soft power," but technology. Technology sanctions conquest and justifies projects to reshape the lives, habits, and environments of distant peoples. Adas has given us an arresting, comprehensive narrative that will change the way we think. -- Nick Cullather, Indiana University Dominance by Design is a wonderful piece of synthesis -- smart, fluent, and wide-ranging. Michael Adas traces the arc of U.S. history and highlights what he calls technocentrism as a major source of American economic, military, and environmental mastery. This argument deserves a readership as broad as the scholarship on which it is based. -- Michael Hunt, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill In this extraordinary, and extraordinarily important, book, Michael Adas not only gives us a fascinating historical overview of American technology but how faith in that technology's power shaped (or tragically misshaped) American religion, fine art, race relations, engineers and engineering, and views of Islam. -- Walter LaFeber, Cornell University Few scholars have so fully grasped the profound connection between exceptionalism, expansionism, and technological evangelism in American history. No one who seeks to understand this country's past, present, or future can afford to ignore this masterful book. -- Paul N. Edwards, University of Michigan

Long before the U.S. became a major force in global affairs, U.S. expansionists assumed a mandate to “civilize” non-Western peoples by demanding submission to American technological prowess and design. Adas pursues the history of this mission through America's foreign relations over nearly four centuries.

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.