Bruce Cumings's book is a vast, sprawling, amusing, intermittently horrifying and always fascinating account of the reorientation of the United States from the Atlantic toward the Pacific over the 150-odd years since the U.S. conquest of California. As such, it performs an important function. Nevertheless, as Cumings points out, for all of the importance formally accorded to relations with China and trade with Asia, and despite three major wars in Asia over the past 70 years, the U.S. geopolitical establishment remains overwhelmingly focused on Europe and the Middle East.

Even more striking, as I found during my time at think tanks in Washington, DC, is the indifference of the U.S. foreign policy and security establishment (with the exception, obviously, of the Drug Enforcement Agency) to developments in Central and South America. Ukraine, and even Georgia, often seem to loom larger in U.S. geopolitical thinking than Mexico and Guatemala—despite the impact of these latter countries on U.S. society and the presence of so many of their citizens within U.S. society in general and California in particular.

This book is a new departure for Cumings, who made a career and a famous name as the leading U.S. expert on the Korean peninsula and as a prominent voice on America's involvement in East Asia. He has not, however, hitherto written about the internal development of America itself. The book embraces the history both of California, the Northwest, and parts of the West and of key aspects of America's foreign policy. It embraces a somewhat wryly affectionate look at Seattle and the New England (or perhaps would-be New England) traditions of Washington and Oregon, where Cumings used to work. It is beautifully written, with numerous pungent asides and telling anecdotes, not least concerning the extreme idiosyncrasies—to use no stronger a word—of so many of the men who created America in the West.

As its name suggests, Dominion from Sea to Sea is nothing less than a combination of an analysis and a narrative history of a large part of the United States. It shows how possession and development of California—which gained statehood even before Minnesota—was responsible for filling in what until very late in the nineteenth century was the immense gap between the West Coast and the settled lands of the West and Midwest. The “Great Flyover” was equally true of the Conestoga wagon trains, which passed through these territories without stopping on their way to Oregon and California. They just traveled more slowly than today's passenger jets.

Cumings argues cogently for the critical importance of the West Coast in shaping almost every aspect of the modern United States: the U.S. economy, demography, foreign policy, culture, and, not least, America's idea of itself. In assessing the history of the region, he strikes a sensible and valuable middle path between the mindless nationalist self-praise of the Right (and much of popular culture in general) and some of the constant self-denigration and doomsaying of the Left. This may come as a surprise to some of the author's critics, and, perhaps, some of his supporters as well, given his reputation as a left-wing critic of U.S. foreign policy; and indeed, this book contains an excoriating critique of the Bush administration.

Cumings records the appalling history of racism, massacre, capitalist exploitation, and environmental degradation in the region under U.S. rule, while at the same time giving full credit to the West Coast's extraordinary economic, technological, and infrastructural achievements, and above all its remarkable capacity to reinvent itself economically every generation or so. In particular, this work is a useful antidote to the projections of Mike Davis (of City of Quartz, 1992, and Ecology of Fear, 1999) —excellent as science fiction but less so as analysis—and the tradition of viewing California as an impending apocalypse. As Cumings points out, nothing in California's history begins to compare to the damage done to Japan by earthquakes, let alone wars; yet Japan has survived and prospered.

In a book of this scale, there are bound to be omissions. Some are minor. Others, however, are quite considerable and rather odd. One of these—to start with the particular and move to the general—begins with the author's almost complete omission of John Steinbeck, and complete omission of one of the most famous books ever written about California, The Grapes of Wrath. By this I do not mean to make any great claim for the quality of that book as a novel, but it stands in most people's minds for a historical process of immense importance to the history of California, namely, the migration of the “Okies,” former farmers from the Dust Bowl states of the lower Midwest, who brought with them to California their particular brand of fundamentalism, conservatism, nationalism, and populism. Cumings dwells on some of the right-wing eccentricities of California's millionaires, but it has been the “Okies” who have provided them with the foot soldiers.

This leads in turn to something else that is very oddly almost entirely omitted—Proposition 13—and stemming in part from it California's crisis of government and revenue in recent years. Cumings has some justifiably unkind fun with the weirdnesses of Californian politicians over the years. Yet the striking thing about Arnold Schwarzenegger has been that whatever his somewhat strange origins, he has in fact operated as a rather able and pragmatic governor; however, neither he nor anyone else has been able to get a grip on California's problems. Now, perhaps these in the end do not matter much, and the underlying vitality of California's economy will make up for the failures of its political system, but I would not like to bet on it.

Furthermore, like every major book about California, this one is also about the American Dream meeting its limits, and Proposition 13 and its consequences are all about a particular dream of small-town, direct democracy opposing the political elites—as also reflected in the present Tea Party movement. This, in turn, is related to another issue that Cumings does not address in any depth, which is the distribution of the West Coast's wealth, and whether—as has been widely argued—the American Dream is running out so far as most of the U.S. middle classes are concerned. If, God forbid, this is so, it will have an effect on every other area of regional and national life, including, most probably (as presently seen in Arizona), ethnic relations.

Finally, there is the question of potentially finite natural resources, and once again, the American and Californian dreams have been largely built on a belief in unlimited resources, especially when it comes to energy and water. Cumings's omission of this issue (except in the context of the notorious past seizure of Los Angeles's water supply by local elites, as referred to in the film Chinatown) is especially strange in a book dealing not just with the West Coast but also with the contiguous and arid West.

Resources may also play a decisive future role in one of Cumings's major subthemes, that of U.S. relations with China. He is quite correct in arguing that at present there are no real factors propelling the United States and China toward confrontation; as well as in denouncing ugly and dangerous attempts to whip up anti-Chinese hysteria, as, for example, the Cox report of 1999. If, however, Chinese consumption continues to grow, while the United States remains as profligate as it has been up to now, there would seem a real possibility that in Africa and elsewhere, the United States and China will find themselves competing for vital and increasingly scarce resources and the land in which they sit. As some of the darker pages of this study indicate, in the past Americans have not generally resolved such disputes peacefully.