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Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance

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Why is it that Europe explored, conquered, and created colonies in Asia, Africa, the Americas, and islands around the world? Why not the other way around? The answer, for historian Michael Adas of Rutgers University, rests with the development of western science and technology, and the manner in which these systems of knowledge were understood and used. Indeed, Adas is most concerned with how Europeans employed these understandings to relate to the non-Europeans they encountered. Dividing the book in three parts--before the industrial revolution, the age of industrialization, and the twentieth century--Adas brilliantly analyzes the change over time of how Europeans related to these other cultures. Always, as he finds by unpacking explorers' and other observers' accounts, Europeans expressed superiority for the others they found. Sometimes they claimed moral and social superiority but at other times, and increasingly as time progressed, they asserted scientific and technical preeminence. As European industrialization took hold, the question of superiority moved almost exclusively from a moral basis to a material one, based on the creation of the more complex machines that emerged beginning in the seventeenth century.

Adas spends the majority of this challenging book building a complex and highly significant story of colonial justifications. He uses a broad range of sources from philosophers and thinkers such as Voltaire to explorers to such proponents of British imperialism as Rudyard Kipling to show the evolution of the colonial ideal. What emerges is a portrait, embraced by the Europeans, of Europe as clearly preeminent in the world and having the responsibility to civilize and christianize the "backward" peoples of the Earth. For Europeans, as Adas shows, the rise of science and technology, as well as the ideas of the Enlightenment, signified the defeat of superstition, paganism, and irrationality. They had the duty, Europeans believed, to accept what came to be called the "white man's burden" to bring the blessings of western culture to those elsewhere. It would require centuries of "tutoring," a period in which colonizers would rule those other cultures and bring the fundamental changes they valued. Colonial rule, Adas points out, was not just for the extraction of natural resources and for the brutal exploitation of those colonized--although that did take place--but also for the "civilizing" of "barbarians." The author notes that the United States, soon after its creation took essentially the same approach toward dealing with Native Americans and other inhabitants of North America, and later in its wars of conquest in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Of course, this book was written well before the invasion of Iraq in 2003, but similar justifications have been voiced by American officials as the reason for overthrowing Saddam Hussein.

If all of this sounds like a massive rationalization of colonial rule and its ever present oppression, it was. Few, at least as Adas tells the story, recognized it at the time, but one must ask if there were not minority reports on the legitimacy of what was taking place? Famed University of Chicago historian William H. McNeill, questioned this in his review of "Machines as the Measure of Men." He writes, "Adas may be quite correct in the conclusions he offers, but the evidence he uses is intrinsically imperfect. Quotations from European writers of the 19th century who deplored technology and declared it was destroying true civilization are easy to find; a collection of passages could also readily be used to prove the exact opposite of what Adas tells us. Who might be right?" (Quoted from "Quarterly Review of Biology" 65 (June 1990): 211.)

Notwithstanding this question, Adas has provided readers with a powerful analysis of the justifications for colonialism that reigned for more than five centuries. While the arguments changed over time, as Adas points out, the change was more in degree than in structure. Always the preeminence of European culture was preserved. First, Europeans defined themselves in relation to other cultures principally by religion. This changed with the Enlightenment, when moral philosophy began to reign. Add to this scientific and technological virtuosity and the supremacy of European institutions was assured. The broad thrust of this argument is persuasive, and indeed modern science and technology remains a significant measure of cultural worth to the present. Adas's work is recommended as a powerful statement of European attitudes toward other civilizations and the justifications use to buttress colonialism.

Michael Adas' excellent book "Machines as the Measure of Men" says all about the topic: it is an extremely thorough and systematic study of the role of ideas of technological and scientific superiority in the European outlook on non-European peoples. Covering the historical gamut from the time of Columbus to (briefly) post-WWII developments and including an absolutely stunning array of sources, studies and quotations to buttress its thesis, it is bound to impress even specialists in the field, let alone general readers - and given it won the 1991 prize of the Society for the History of Technology, it seems to have done so. But although the material is gone over with a breadth and depth of learning that is impressive even for a specialized monograph, it is very accessible to the general reader, not in the least place due to Adas' extensive use of quotations from political and literary sources. This makes it also a very strong book as popular history on the experience and ideology of European imperialism.

Adas' main thesis is that European ideologies of superiority and dominance, justifying first exploratory-exploitational and later explicitly colonialist enterprises, were founded first and foremost on using a ranking of peoples and cultures in terms of the level of science and technology achieved by them. As has been pointed out by other historians as well, the European attitude to China is a good example; in the 16th and 17th centuries, when Europe compared fairly modestly with China in terms of economic performance but also in terms of technological accomplishments, China was generally seen as a highly sophisticated and superior realm with almost perfect good government and containing a wise and enterprising people, who only happened unfortunately not to be Christians. But as Europe's lead over China in technological terms increased, China increasingly became seen as a cesspool of corruption, laziness and stagnation and having never seriously accomplished any novelties or innovation in their long history of stubborn bureaucracy. The Chinese themselves were seen from the late 18th century on as superstitious, arrogant and cowardly and unable to innovate or accept anything new. As Adas shows, this sort of pattern is repeated consistently for each people or 'race' and in each region. As Europe itself became ever more 'scientific' and industrialized, more and more only machines became the true measure of men, and the worth of each people determined by their skills at and attitude towards technology and (to a lesser extent) science.

Adas emphasizes the importance of this phenomenon and also the manner in which it contrasts with other theories. In the earliest stages of exploration, during the late Renaissance, the main judgment of Europeans toward non-European peoples was in terms of cultural norms (for example an abhorrence of nakedness) and likelihood of Christian conversion, but outside religious terms there was a remarkable degree of relativism about the observations of foreign lands. The technological measure from about the time of Newton and the 'Scientific Revolution' on displaced this attitude, and led over time to persistent systematic rankings of all peoples and cultures on scales from lower to higher, invariably with the Western Europeans on top (whereby who the ultimate people were depended on whether the author was French or British). The true imperial attitude was born, whereby the dominated state of the colonies proved that the peoples had been unable to make scientific use of their resources by commanding nature through technology as well as the Europeans, and this in turn justified the European domination of those colonies in the first place.

Nonetheless, it is important to distinguish this way of thinking from a purely race-based one. As Adas correctly points out at length, explicitly racial and thereby 'innate' classifications of peoples were extremely marginal until the second half of the 19th century, reaching their peak only around the 1880s-1890s (and possibly early 20th century) - and even then they represented only a significant minority of intellectual views on the matter, and the author sees their actual import in terms of effect on imperial policy as very limited. The 'technological measure' tended to combine the Enlightenment belief in human equality with the Victorian view of science as the pinnacle of human endeavour in their judgement of African and Asian peoples: although in principle all men were equally capable of attaining the highest scientific level of civilization, only the Europeans had actually fully developed the potential of their minds while the lower peoples had stalled at an earlier or later phase. This led to a split among intellectuals on what this implied for imperial policy: some argued that this meant that Africans and Asians could become just as skilled at science and technology as Europeans, after a period of European tutelage, perhaps even eventually leading to self-determination. But as the colonial-educated middle class in India and Africa increasingly became nationalist, and they started taking this as a serious proposition, this 'improver' view became less popular among the administrators. Instead, they favored increasingly an alternative view which saw the divergence in European and non-European minds as having taken place fairly early in history, and thereby being so ingrained that it would take generations or centuries to overcome. The majority of intellectual discussion about justification for imperial rule took place in terms of either of these camps, rather than in terms of immutable racial classifications, and often authors would take on eclectic elements of either into their argument for a particular policy or viewpoint.

Adas ends the book, unlike many studies of imperial thought, not at the end of the Victorian age but with a discussion of the way in which the mechanical horror of World War I undermined European self-confidence. The superiority of better technology was now not so evident, and there was widespread disillusionment with 'improving' viewpoints. However, this did not necessarily lead to a lesser evaluation of science and technology as a measure of civilization; on the contrary, among other things it led to 'reactionary modernism' such as fascism, where such subservience of man to machinery of death was seen as the way of the future. Post-WWII, racial theories and such explicit love of war machinery became unacceptable, but Adas does briefly point out that both American and Soviet-supporting development thinkers in and about the Third World tended and tend to see industrialization and technology as the main measures of 'progress'. While the author is clearly somewhat skeptical of these standards, he does take good care to not really editorialize about whether the imperialist thinkers were right or not about seeing technology as the way forward for mankind, and this seems a topic of contention by no means resolved in our current day, with good arguments existing on either side. Even new leaders in the formerly colonized areas are by no means united on whether or not they prefer this measurement either, and it is not clear what other yardstick could be used instead.

Overall, this is a magisterial and fantastic effort on the topic, which fully deserves a read by anyone interested in imperialism and ideology. It took the author some ten years to write it, and maybe because of that the promised sequel about African and Asian responses to the ideology of technology has, as far as I can tell, never actually been written. This as well as a deeper study of the functioning of this ideology today would be worthy tasks of an author of this caliber. The book also does not particularly go into the impact in concrete terms of the policies based on the ideology, only the forms it took and the debates within it. But this book truly contains everything one could want to know about the way in which for Europeans in an age of empire, machines are the measure of men.