A text
extending from the heyday of late-modern Eurocentric history, Michael Adas’ Machines as the Measure of Men is a
thorough examination of the effects industrialization and technological
supremacy had on Western perceptions on non-Western peoples and cultures. As per the subtitle, Adas is less interested
in the direct actions (cause and effect) of Westerners and more interested in
the ideologies generated as a result of industrialization and the development
of Western technology. Starting with an
iconic scene from the 1740s, where William Smith and his slave found joy in
making light of African natives’ ignorance over geographical instruments, Adas
traces the development of ideology in the West up through World War II—the period
under which the United States became champion of technological power and the
means to utilizing it. Adas does make a
few important arguments, which he says are not necessarily the focus of his
text—but that is what I chose to focus on here for this review.
Adas
develops a rather complex thesis around a concept that most students of history
learn simply by studying monographs and regional histories. Despite this, Adas claims that historians
overlook how scientific and technological accomplishments functioned “as
measures of European superiority and as gauges of the abilities of non-Western
peoples.”[i] As Adas unfolds the text through three major
phases—one on the discovery/explorational period of the 16th and 17th
centuries, one on the industrialization period of the 18th and 19th
centuries, and one on the 20th century—it quickly becomes clear that
Adas refers to a specific kind of
technology to foster both physical “superiority” as well as perceptions of the “abilities”
of the superior West. Even in his first
example, on page one, Adas comments on how Smith had a weapon available at all
times in order to defend himself. He is
correct in pointing out that most missionaries engaged with non-Western peoples
under the presumption that their Christianity gave them a superior status, but
this only addresses the perception of
superiority. Their physical superiority
came in both the manner of their arrival (warships, with arms) as well as in
the scientific development of medicine.[ii] With regard to Asia, however, Westerners
would have to wait until the early 18th century before seeing
advances that separated Western medicinal power from that of the Chinese.[iii]
By the
industrial period, it advancements in warfare—particularly guns and cannons—created
the true distinction among Westerners that separated them from their Eastern
trading partners and the colonial regions of Africa. The simple lack of such innovations in Africa
led European intellectuals to presume the immediate inferiority of the African
peoples; best expressed by Edward Long who said that “Negroes [were] incapable
of adopting European technology or inventing their own.”[iv] Views such as this contributed to the
perception that Africans lacked “the capacity to think scientifically.” Adas does not, however, focus on weapons and means of warfare as the central focus of technological and
scientific power; but it is not hard to put the pieces together.
For
example, Adas points out that “the coal- and steam-powered revolution in
production, transportation, and extraction,” which unfolded over a four-decade
period, transformed perceptions of progress and power from moral and
materialistic arguments into the “singularity and powerful application of
machines against time and speed.”[v] The true superiority then held by Europeans
was best represented by the great essayist Thomas Babington Macaulay, who
commented the power of Western Europe lay with the primary fact that the
British fleet “could annihilate in a quarter of an hour the preindustrial
navies of Tyre, Athens, Carthage, Venice and Genoa together.”[vi] Ultimately power and supremacy
derived not simply from the utilization of industrial machinery, but from their
application toward military technology—ships with steel hulls, guns with
accurate barrels, and eventually the machine gun. On this point, Adas has little to say, but he
nevertheless includes all the data necessary to formulate this argument.
Of the
more controversial arguments tackled by Adas in his text pertains to social
perceptions of racism and non-Western peoples.
The term racism implies a
certain form of supremacy or forced inferiority. For Adas, however, racism was less the result
of moral and ethical perceptions of non-Whites than it was the result of the
same cultural distinction White Europeans had with all non-Western peoples and
cultures. In his own words, racism “should
be viewed as a subordinate rather than the dominant theme in European
intellectual discourse on non-Western peoples.”[vii] To justify his position, Adas refers to
debates about the supposed inferiority of blacks where technology and
scientific prowess were used on both sides to justify positions. Many intellectuals, Adas argues, sought “scientific
and technological proofs of Western superiority while rejecting those based on
racist arguments.”[viii] In other words, arguments about the moral,
physical, or religious backgrounds of blacks were less important to justifying
racism than were comparative arguments about the technological abilities of
African cultures. In this manner, Adas
asks his readers and intellectuals to suspend their contemporary understanding
of racism and view it through the lens of technology. This, however, can be complicated.
For
one, it is nearly impossible to deny that perceptions of technological prowess
had direct effects on the cultivation of racial attitudes. But it would be equally impossible to reject,
or downplay, the social utility of moral and projective racism. It could simply be a matter of where Adas is
placing agency with the cultivation of racial attitudes—even though he admits
at the beginning that his text is not intended to be “a study of racism or
racial prejudice per se.”[ix] He is placing primary agency in the
intellectual, upper-middle class; which is also the focus group for his entire
study in Western civilization.
Throughout his text he does not focus exclusively on the highest and
lowest classes in society—places where the more moral- and culturally-bound
perceptions of racism dominated. As
well, intellectuals’ claim that “tools and cannons and conceptions of space and
time were….the most tangible means of distinguishing civilized peoples from
savages and barbarians” had little grounded reality in the lower classes of
Europe, most who did not study advanced physics nor fully understood the
mechanics and science behind the tools and cannons they worked with.[x]
Secondly,
Adas’ appeal to the intellectual nature of 18th and 19th
century racism does not help to explain the dominance of cultural and moral
racism of the late 19th, 20th, and 21st
centuries. If anything, Adas’ arguments
suggest how racial attitudes were legitimized
in a society where science and standards of methods reigned supreme. As anyone in Western civilization—today, or
back then—understands however, moral and cultural arguments for racial inferiority
permeated Western culture in a manner much different from the scientific
publications of journals, pamphlets, and public release statements. If anything, scientific justifications of
racism were the exception to the rule
in Western society—they legitimized racial attitudes in a society that demanded
empirical evidence, but were only used when moral and cultural appeals
failed. On this, Adas says little; and
though his text is not intended to focus on racism directly, he inadvertently
places a central argument about race within his over-arching argument about the
ability of scientific and technological prowess to manipulate Western
perceptions of non-Westerners.
With
regard to Gender, Adas says very little other than the fact that most
perceptions about scientific and technological superiority in the West carried
an overtly masculine identity.
Scientific accomplishments, achieved mostly by men, reinforced
preexisting notions of gender identity and roles within Western civilization
while simultaneously supporting a perception of inferiority among societies
that differed in their gender social arrangement. Machines themselves, Adas emphasizes,
advanced the productive capacity of masculine labor; they were “invoked to
demonstrate that men of one type were superior to another” simply by their
mastery of the machine.[xi] While Adas does address certain prominent
female intellectuals who assisted in fostering a cultural sense of superiority
in the West, he does little to explain the overtly masculine nature of
technology and the scientific community behind it. This, of course, is not the aim of his
textbook—but it is a valid area of concern, one that brings up questions about
the nature of technological superiority that extends beyond the dimensions of
race, ethnicity, and geographic location.
We are not given a glimpse, for example, into how European perceptions
of supremacy over American Natives rested with gender-related differences (such
as the matriarchal community of the Iroquois).
Adas does create a starting point for this examination, however.
One
final criticism I personally have with Adas is his lumping in of Marx, Engels,
and other European philosophers of the 19th century into the
category of presuming Western supremacy was built on industrialization and
negated racially-bound perceptions.
Specifically, he states that Marx and his contemporaries “avoided racial
terminology and eschewed racial categories of analysis.” With regard to Marx’s writings on class and
social categories in Europe, this is primarily true. But one glance at the writings of European
philosophers on situations outside of
Europe, and one must question Adas’ position.
Marx, for example, wrote extensively on slavery in the United States
over a thirty year period, up until 1863.
Throughout this period, Marx emphasized the class nature of “direct slavery” in the Southern United States
against the “indirect slavery” of capitalism (wage labor); but at no point did
Marx downplay or ignore the culturally-bound explanation of these
scenarios: Slavery in the South was built
on the subjugation of foreign peoples, people taken from their homeland and
placed into the production system by force.
This did not “eschew racial categories of analysis” simply by not
utilizing the word “racist” (which was not a common term in Marx’s day), but
rather it attempted to contextualize a production mode with historical agency
and causality: the subjugation of
Africans. In other words, Adas’ attempt
to portray Marx and other philosophers as simply sharing the same attitudes as
other contemporary intellectuals downplays
and to a certain extent negates the extensive differences between these
intellectuals with regard to social development.
Overall,
I would certainly put Adas’ book on a “must read” list, but I would be hesitant
to take its conclusions for granted without a comparative analysis to more
expansive works that attempt a cross-section analysis of themes such as race,
gender, class, and culture. Adas
effectively explores the similarities of ideology with regard to scientific and
technological prowess over a 400 year period, but he does so by downplaying and
at times ignoring the differences in ideology between the dominant Western
nations (France, Britain, USA). For
those seeking a textbook that helps to highlight the ideological nature of
perceptive supremacy, however, look no further: this book has it.
[i]
Adas, Michael. Machines as the Measure of Men (Cornell University Press, 1989), 4
[ii]
Ibid, 22; It should be noted that throughout the 17th and 18th
centuries, withholding medicine from non-Western peoples was a documented means
of assaulting peoples and subjugating them, creating dependency on Western
medicine.
[iii]
Ibid
[iv]
Ibid, 114
[v]
Ibid, 136
[vi]
Ibid
[vii]
Ibid, 12
[viii]
Ibid
[ix]
Ibid
[x]
Ibid, 68
[xi]
Ibid, 14
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