Through the generosity of the late Professor Benedict Anderson and Ajarn Charnvit Kasetsiri, the Thammasat University Library has newly acquired some important books of interest for students of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) studies, political science, literature, and related fields.

They are part of a special bequest of over 2800 books from the personal scholarly library of Professor Benedict Anderson at Cornell University, in addition to the previous donation of books from the library of Professor Anderson at his home in Bangkok. These newly available items will be on the TU Library shelves for the benefit of our students and ajarns. They are shelved in the Charnvit Kasetsiri Room of the Pridi Banomyong Library, Tha Prachan campus.

Among them is a newly acquired book that should be useful to TU students who are interested in science, technology, cultural politics, history, sociology, political science, and related subjects.

Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance is by Michael Adas. The TU library collection has several other books about different aspects of the effect of science and technology on society.

Professor Michael Adas teaches history at Rutgers University. He specializes in the history of technology, the history of anticolonialism and in global history. The publisher’s description of Machines as the Measure of Men notes:

Over the past five centuries, advances in Western understanding of and control over the material world have strongly influenced European responses to non-Western peoples and cultures. In Machines as the Measure of Men, Michael Adas explores the ways in which European perceptions of their scientific and technological superiority shaped their interactions with people overseas. Adopting a broad, comparative perspective, he analyzes European responses to the cultures of sub-Saharan Africa, India, and China, cultures that they judged to represent lower levels of material mastery and social organization.

Beginning with the early decades of overseas expansion in the sixteenth century, Adas traces the impact of scientific and technological advances on European attitudes toward Asians and Africans and on their policies for dealing with colonized societies. He concentrates on British and French thinking in the nineteenth century, when, he maintains, scientific and technological measures of human worth played a critical role in shaping arguments for the notion of racial supremacy and the “civilizing mission” ideology which were used to justify Europe’s domination of the globe. Finally, he examines the reasons why many Europeans grew dissatisfied with and even rejected this gauge of human worth after World War I, and explains why it has remained important to Americans.

Showing how the scientific and industrial revolutions contributed to the development of European imperialist ideologies, Machines as the Measure of Men highlights the cultural factors that have nurtured disdain for non-Western accomplishments and value systems. It also indicates how these attitudes, in shaping policies that restricted the diffusion of scientific knowledge, have perpetuated themselves, and contributed significantly to chronic underdevelopment throughout the developing world. Adas’s far-reaching and provocative book will be compelling reading for all who are concerned about the history of Western imperialism and its legacies.

First published to wide acclaim in 1989, Machines as the Measure of Men is now available in a new edition that features a preface by the author that discusses how subsequent developments in gender and race studies, as well as global technology and politics, enter into conversation with his original arguments.

Professor Adas observes in an introduction to his book:

In view of their importance, it is remarkable that scientific and technological accomplishments as measures of European superiority and as gauges of the abilities of non-Western peoples have been so little studied. Most authors who have dealt with European attitudes toward African and Asian peoples in the industrial era acknowledge that Europe’s transformation and the power differential that it created had much to do with the hardening of European assumptions of racial supremacy in the late nineteenth century. But few writers have examined these complex connections in any detail, and in all cases consideration of them has been subordinated to discussion of racist issues. The rare works that deal in any depth with the pervasive effects of the scientific and industrial revolutions on European perceptions of non-Western peoples are focused on Africa, the geographical area that elicited the most extreme responses. Because these studies cover a wide range of topics beyond the impact of European advances in science and technology, even for Africa we have only a partial view of one of the most critical dimensions of European interaction with non-Western peoples in the modern era. For China, India, the Islamic empires, and the Amerindian civilizations of the New World, we have little more than chance comments on the superiority of European weapons, tools, and mathematical techniques. The accounts that deal with these observations often give little sense of the material conditions and the cultural ~nd ideological milieus that shaped them or their place in the broader, ongoing process of European exchange with non-Western peoples which has spanned the last half-millennium. This book examines the ways in which Europeans’ perceptions of the material superiority of their own cultures, particularly as manifested in scientific thought and technological innovation, shaped their attitudes toward and interaction with peoples they encountered overseas. It is not a work in the history of science or technology as those fields are usually defined…

The misuse of these standards has not only impeded and selectively channeled the spread of Western knowledge, skills, and machines; it has also undermined techniques of production and ways of thinking about the natural world indigenous to African and Asian societies. Concern for the decline of these alternatives is not simply a matter of relativistic affirmation of the need to preserve difference and heterogeneity. Their demise means the neglect or loss of values, understandings, and methods that might have enriched and modified the course of development dominated by Western science and technology. The possibilities of alternative systems are suggested, for example, by the recent Western recognition of the efficacy of Chinese acupuncture, as well as Indian, African, and Amerindian healing techniques. As we better understand the attitudes toward the environment and material acquisition that were fostered by non-Western philosophical and religious systems, we also begin to appreciate how they might have tempered the Western obsession with material mastery and its consequences: pollution, the squandering of finite resources, and the potential for global destruction. It is, I think, significant that a passage from the Bhagavad-Gita “floated through the mind” of the “father” of the atomic bomb, Robert Oppenheimer, as he witnessed the detonation of the first of these weapons: “I am become death, the shatterer of worlds. ” Less arrogance and greater sensitivity to African and Asian thought systems, techniques of production, and patterns of social organization would also have enhanced the possibility of working out alternative approaches to development in non-Western areas, approaches that might have proved better suited to Third World societies than the scientific-industrial model in either its Western or its Soviet guise. At the very least, the first generations of Western-educated leaders in the newly independent states of Africa and Asia would have been more aware of the possibilities offered by their own cultures and less committed to full-scale industrialization, which most of them viewed as essential for social and economic reconstruction. The reappraisal in recent decades of Gandhi an social and economic philosophy, which was long a favorite target for the sarcastic barbs of development specialists, reflects a growing recognition that the paths followed by western Europeans, North Americans, and the Soviets are not the only possible routes to national solvency and material well-being.  

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)