Michael Adas's Dominance by Design is a weighty tome that examines the history of America's fascination with technological innovation and its influence on foreign policy and international affairs. Divided into seven chapters that focus on specific periods in American history, Adas outlines how early colonists, Puritan settlers, diplomats, the military, scientists, engineers, and politicians have used technology (which he considers widely, from developments in colonial farming techniques to nuclear weapons and battlefield technoscience) to inculcate, amongst others, Native Americans, Europeans, Japanese, and Iraqis to adopt the treasured American values of individualism, democracy, capitalism and progress. America's mission, to civilize the world and push its form of democratic governance, is underpinned by a sense of technological superiority. This can be best exemplified by the well-documented and historicized space race between the US and the USSR in the 1950s and 1960s; America's preoccupation with beating the Soviet Union in reaching the Moon was founded on the idea that it had the best minds, biggest budget, and strongest astronauts to do the job, therefore it was a matter of destiny that America would win. Likewise, as Adas makes clear, such “[t]echnological pursuits and material achievement have strongly influenced the construction of American identity, on both an individual and collective basis” (9); the myriad technological developments and scientific inventions of the last four hundred years have helped to mould the national character of the United States as it sought to establish its borders and influence its neighbours.

Of particular interest in this book is Adas's reinterpretation of the conflict between white settler and Native American, which he sees as crucial in the emergence of a sense of cultural superiority so important to America's continued political and military involvement overseas. He argues that native Indian techniques for surviving in the wilderness and using the natural resources of the land were not lauded by early settlers, as often described in histories of colonial America, but were instead looked down upon by English colonizers as examples of the Indian's treacherous behaviour and ignorant attitude to the environment (54–55). Adas's reappraisal of the relationship between settlers and the “Noble Savage,” often seen by historians as being at its most unusually productive and friendly when whites learned to adapt on the frontier by using Indian methods, highlights the contradictions at the heart of America's changing sense of identity and nationhood. How the United States perceives itself, in relation to those nations and peoples at odds with its mission to spread democracy, is in a constant state of flux. Adas makes it clear that while technological superiority has been at the centre of the nation's attempts to change the world, its civilizing mission has also always been shaped by an essential sense of inferiority: when the Russians launched Sputnik, Americans were embarrassed and shocked that they had been outsmarted (238–39); when the World Trade Center, symbol of US economic strength, was destroyed by terrorists using box cutters and American-made aircraft, Americans were puzzled and appalled that such devastation could strike on home soil (386–87). Such a stark reminder in his conclusion shows that Dominance by Design is a crucial and timely work that will prove invaluable to students and academics alike.