Among historians of science and technology Michael Adas is known for his 1989 book Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca, NY, 1990). In that book, which was focused on the long nineteenth century, he argued that scientific and technical superiority was critical to ideologies of imperialism, at least to 1914. This book is not really a sequel or elaboration, or an extension of the argument into the twentieth century, but something different in register and ambition. It deals specifically with the United States, from the colonial era to the present, with chapters on the nineteenth century, the case of the Philippines in the very early US colonial era, the inter-war years, the period from 1941, the Vietnam War, the first Gulf War and, in the conclusion, the attacks on the World Trade Center. The theme of the book is that the US has been particularly enthusiastic about technology, and that this enthusiasm has made for a serious problem of technological hubris, best illustrated by the Vietnam experience.

This theme is not of course a novel one among historians of the US and technology, and the book does not claim it is. Indeed it hardly deals at all with existing literature. Rather more troublesome is that it is not really clear what the underlying argument of the book is. Adas talks of technological imperatives, but these are never explained or conceptualized. The link of technological enthusiasm to US self-identity is not fully explored either. Particular technologies, and engineers, are surprisingly absent from the text. It is mostly a reflection on elements of US elite thinking about technology and imperial power.

There are some problems, well exemplified in the book, with this genre of technology-in-America writing. One is that the arguments are so insular. The rest of the world hardly exists, and technological innovation and enthusiasm is made to seem a particularly North American phenomenon. The problem is illustrated by the cover, which shows a ball bearing. It says ‘Made in USA’ on it, but the ‘SKF’ marking tells us it was made by the Swedish SKF company, and was probably merely manufactured in the USA. It was a Swedish 1907 design, and the photographed example was donated to New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1934, as one of the first objects to enter its design collection. For much of the period covered by this book, US technological imperialism was a poor cousin to British, French, German and Dutch technological imperialism. The US, in technology as in industry, was a uniquely successful follower, not the originator. But in Adas's book the comparisons with other imperialisms appear only so briefly as to be unconvincing.

A second problem is that enthusiasm for technology is made the central defining feature of the US, for good or ill. But this is clearly a highly ideological construction which needs unpacking. For many foreign analysts the most obvious differentiating feature is not attitudes to technology but rampant, and immensely productive, capitalism. This economic setting is essentially missing from this book, which focuses on the imperial state and the military. Yet to most non-Americans the US civilizing mission, positive and negative, was experienced first and foremost by engagement with Ford cars, United Fruit and General Electric, rather than as colonial subjects or with bearers of US arms. Arms and the formal empire are only part of the story. It is worth comparing Dominance by Design with a book from nearly three decades ago, whose title it echoes, David Noble's America by Design: Science, Technology and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (Oxford, 1977).

A third general problem exemplified by the book, and especially surprising in this case, is that the story of US imperialism is told almost entirely from the perspective of US actors. Even here, the Filipinos or the Vietnamese do not really count, just as they did not in the eyes of the imperial state. It is a profoundly US view of its own predicament, or rather, more specifically, the view of a particular fraction of the US liberal academic elite.