Review:Machines as the Measure of Men

As stated in the title, Michael Adas makes a brilliant observation about the ideas of Western and European superiority compared with Asia, India and Africa. The first chapter is devoted to exploration and contact made prior to the Industrial Revolution. Adas asserts that many explorers were in awe of societies in Asia in particular. Most of the developments in Africa were regarded as inferior, particularly on the west coast of the continent. Some Muslim societies on the eastern side of Africa were deemed as culturally advanced, mainly for reasons of wealth, rather than actual advances in science and technology. Adas claims that in many areas (cotton textile and porcelain manufacturing) Europeans were actually behind in development.[1] One reason for this was the belief by aristocratic and upper bourgeois families that people who engaged in “labor of the hands" were “viles personnes"[2] This idea that those who toiled with technological and industrial endeavors were not gentlemen, influenced the reports of explorers, who were primarily composed of these two classes of people. This would create a vacuum in the actual knowledge of many African and Asian advances that might have been otherwise detected. This belief, when combined with the religious differences that caused many explorers and western merchants to hold the people of these lands in contempt, led to the almost subhuman view many westerners held of anyone who had different ideas.

Another development in thinking that caused even further confusion was most westerners prior to the industrial revolution thought that philosophy and ethics were just as “scientific as mechanics and astronomy.[3]

Adas employs many interesting ideas when demonstrating this disparity of knowledge created by the factors mentioned above. One of the most intriguing examples was the fact that many European Traders took only cloth and beads when they set out to find silk and spices. Many of the Muslim Rulers of West Africa took insult to this. This was especially true in Vasco de Gamma’s case. It is also interesting to note that many of the early explorers such as de Gamma thought that the Hindu people of India were in fact Christians. This misconception took quite some time to correct. Although Adas uses Africa, India and Asia as examples he ultimately leads the reader to view China as the most advanced of the three.[4] This is demonstrated by the lack of historical discourse concerning the details of any existing philosophy in Africa, but much was written concerning India and China. On a side note it is interesting to point out that Adas demonstrates one of the ways in which the Indians were viewed as “backward" was that their doctors did not use bleeding as a form of treatment.

The result of these misconceptions was that the level of knowledge dissemination that could have been possible was never reached. Europeans were instead guided toward the culmination of scientific knowledge by such things as the need for navigation instruments and religion.[5]

During this same time period there were other forces in the east that were preventing them from truly benefiting from all of the knowledge the west had to offer. One example of this was the disparity between European and Chinese mapmaking. While they possessed excellent maps of their own country, the depiction of all places outside China “bordered on the absurd". This was due to China’s concentric philosophy. This leads to a central theme in this section of Adas’s book, “it was differences in material culture that had the most to do with the emergence of a hierarchy of non-Western peoples that began to take shape in the minds of explorers."[6]

Central to this theme Adas goes on to determine that the emergence of technological breakthroughs, culminating with Newton’s work, was slow and almost undetectable by those experiencing the changes. This led to a much slower examination of other society’s technological breakthroughs by Europeans. The process was helped by many of the enlightenment thinkers who were supportive of the new ideas.

These things all lead to an undeniable outcome, which was global hegemony and the need for conquest by the west. These ideas led to the Europeans measuring other societies by different standards. They were now concerned more with scientific and technological breakthroughs than traditional philosophy and mathematics.[7] This in some ways changed my view of enlightenment thinkers from benevolent to a more aggressive, imperialistic society. Next Adas focuses on the age of industrialization. The rise of hegemony by the western European imperial powers is discussed within the confines of the increasing degree that technology is quickly becoming the main measure of achievement. Adas examines the situation in Africa, India and China by demonstrating an ever increasing disparity between the opinions of the natives and those of the colonists and imperialists. The western Europeans assumed their role was a civilized-missionary one, continuing their false ideas of benevolence and even going further to justify those ideas that even they knew were detrimental to the native people of their respective empires. As Adas stated these ideas seem Orwellian when looked at today.[8] These arguments were further magnified by the fact that non-western peoples increasingly held the Europeans in contempt, and of all of the things that could be learned and exchanged, only wanted scientific and technical know-how.[9]

Adas also demonstrates that the roles of Europe compared to those of Asia, India and Africa were reversed during this the early part of the industrial age. Once exporters of finished goods to Europe, the latter were reduced to supplying Europe with cotton, tea and raw silk While Europe and North America were becoming “global centers for manufactured goods."[10] Another reversal made evident in this section is the idea that religion, during this time period, embraced science. It was during the 1830’s that the Baptist missionary William Carey said “pray can youth be trained for the Christian missionary without science?" This is a stark contrast from the views held by many religious leaders today.

The idea that the views held regarding the “civilizing-mission" were strictly aristocratic and bourgeois in nature changed. They soon became more main-stream and were embraced by a newly emerging middle class. These greater numbers of believers in the socializing mission also used these ideas as a powerful rationale for imperialist expansion.

Adas also cites the growing demand for raw materials as a cause of imperialist expansion and hegemony. Some of these views can be questioned, such as stating that “Lenin placed unwarranted stress on the need to export Europe’s surplus capital."[11] In Lenin’s work (cited by Adas) he actually negates the need for Europe to export capital stating that “The capital-exporting countries of the world have divided the world among themselves in the figurative sense of the term. But finance capital has led to the actual division of the world."[12] Ultimately Lenin’s thought was that capital export enslaved smaller nations, making them subservient to the superpowers. Adas also focuses on the railroad as a primary diffuser of knowledge and imperial power. These new railways would bring the raw materials of the “hinterland" to the factories in Europe at an alarming rate. No longer was the wilderness safe from the full force of imperialism.

The ideas of Karl Marx are discussed in length with specific reference to his thoughts on the impact of machines in Asia. It is interesting to see through Adas that although Marx refuted this idea of the civilizing-mission he also agreed that ultimately the unintended effects of imperialism were revolutionary and therefore beneficial to non-Western peoples. In this section it is pointed out that during this period ‘time’ became a commodity as well. This would lead to an even greater loathing of non-Westerners by the Europeans. Time became a commodity that could be “Saved, spent or wasted." This concept of time was viewed differently in the societies that were governed only by wet and dry seasons or hot and cold periods, not the calendar and the clock. This caused many nineteenth-century writers to attribute certain failures of the period to lack of time and measurement. This went as far as people cautioning that any statement of numbers or quantities made by the Chinese should only be looked at as “informed guesses."[13] These maxims would ultimately lead to a prevailing philosophy that “Europeans would invent, finance and command Africa and Asia would acculturate labor and obey."[14]

Ultimately, as Adas eloquently demonstrates in his chapter on “The Great War", all of these ideas are proved incorrect. The very thought of machines being used to gauge the progress of any civilization was rested with the mass destruction caused by what were initially viewed as technological miracles. The idea of the noble savage once again became attractive as these outdated ideas of imperialism and a civilizing-mission were killed with millions of people during the war.