Machines as the Measure of Men: Britain and Ireland, France and Algeria, Israel and the West Bank-Gaza

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 oppress