Michael Adas

Michael Adas is the Abraham E. Voorhees Professor and Board of Governor’s Chair at Rutgers University at New Brunswick. His early work focused on the comparative history of European colonialism, particularly patterns of economic and social change in South and Southeast Asia (The Burma Delta, 1974, which won the Herfurth Prize in 1975; and State, Market and Peasant in South and Southeast Asia, 1998) and modes of peasant resistance (Prophets of Rebellion, 1979, 1986, 1988; "From Avoidance to Confrontation: Peasant Protest in Pre-Colonial and Colonial Southeast Asia," Comparative Studies in Society and History, 1981, 1992; and "From Footdragging to Flight:  The Evasive History of Peasant Avoidance Protest in South and Southeast Asia,"  The Journal of Peasant Studies, 1986).  

Over the past two decades Adas’s teaching and research have been centered on the impact of Western science and technology on European and American colonization and post-colonial interventions in Asia and Africa.  His Machines as the Measure of Men:  Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance, 1989, 1990 (paperback editions, 1990-1992; Indian edition, 2004 and translations in Greek, Turkish and Korean) was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and won the Dexter Prize of the Society for the History of Technology and the NJ-NEH Annual Book Award. He has edited three volumes of essays on World History for the American Historical Association and Temple University Press, and authored over forty articles and essays for refereed journals and edited collections. With Peter Stearns and Stuart Schwartz, Adas has written college and AP editions of World Civilizations: The Global Experience (6^th ed., 2010) and Turbulent Passage: A Global History of the Twentieth Century (4^th ed., 2009). His work has been generously supported by the Guggenheim, Ford, Carnegie, and Fulbright foundations and Rutgers University.  Professor Adas was awarded the Warren Susman Prize for Teaching Excellence in 1988, and voted the Rutgers College Teacher of the Year in 1992.

In recent years, Michael Adas’s research, writing and teaching have been increasingly concentrated on the history of America’s rise to world hegemony and its ambivalent participation in the process of globalization. His published essays on these themes include "Improving on the Civilising Mission?  Assumptions of United States Exceptionalism in the Colonisation of the Philippines," Itinerario, 1998; "In Defense of Engagement: The Social Uses of History in a Time of Intellectual Abdication," in Joep Leerssen and Ann Rigney, eds., Historians and Social Values, 2000; and “From Settler Colony to Global Hegemon: Integrating the Exceptionalist Narrative of the American Experience into Global History,” American Historical Review, 2001. His most recent book Dominance by Design: Technological Imperatives and America’s Civilizing Mission was published by Harvard University Press in 2006 (pbk. ed, 2009).  He is currently working on several book projects, including a comparative study on the combat experience of British soldiers on the Western Front in World War I and America GIs in Vietnam and a study on the impact of war on the arts in the twentieth century.