Dominion From Sea To Sea: Pacific Ascendancy And American Power, by Bruce Cumings

This book aims to do for the Pacific Ocean and especially for the Chinese-American relationship what Atlantic historians typically do for the Atlantic Ocean and the Anglo-American friendship. There are a lot of things that keep this book from being as enjoyable or worthwhile as it could be, or as seminal as the author wants it to be. For one, the author’s pro-Communist China agenda, and general bias towards radical leftists, makes this book a terribly inaccurate read and terribly biased against Republicans, especially conservative ones. For another, this book suffers terribly from insecurity about the status of the West Coast when compared to the elite circles on the East Coast. The author takes a lot of snipes at cities like Tampa, for example, which are quite gratuitous and unnecessary since the author doesn’t have anything to say about the South except for Texas, which the author views as part of the west, as the author does with Chicago even though it is geographically part of the Midwest. This book, furthermore, would have been a lot better if the author had more to say about the Pacific Ocean as a means of transportation and movement of peoples. One of the things that makes the history of Atlantic historians so compelling is the way that the movement of goods and people and ideas around the ocean helps to join together a complex world made up of the native inhabitants of North and South America, Europe, the Mediterranean Sea, and Africa. The Pacific is a sprawling region, but the author seems more interested in criticizing American attitudes towards land and other people, and not so much about exploring the Pacific Ocean as a geographic region itself.

This book is a bit more than 500 pages of material, divided into five parts and 17 chapters. The author begins with a preface and acknowledgements. This is followed by the first part of the book that discusses the frontier of the mind, with an unoriginal discussion of the machine in the garden (1) as well as the finding of California (2). This is followed by a discussion of manifest destiny which includes the five easy pieces of America’s continental expansion (3), a talk about gold, the continental railroad, and Texas (4), as well as America’s increasingly muscular foreign policy after the Civil War (5). This is followed by a look at the peopling of the West, with a talk about the Pacific Northwest (6), Hawaii and Alaska (7), as well as the experience of Asians in the Pacific states (8). The author then spends three chapters talking about California’s protean nature, including chapters on crops (9), water and power (10), and Southern California in particular (11). The fifth and final part of the book looks at the author’s view of a supposed tipping point in the fate of the West, with chapters on the development of the West (12), the rise of Western Republicanism (13), the non-California west in the postwar era (14), America’s Pacific empire–ignoring Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands as imperial territories (15), Silicon Valley (16), and a conclusion on the American century (17). The book then ends with an appendix where the author explains his Marxist perspective, notes, bibliography, and index.

Ultimately, this book is a highly tiresome read. Over and over again the author demonstrates his bias by sniping at Republicans, showing contempt towards those who take the Bible seriously, and engages in blatant political favoritism, even thinking that anti-Communism was a mistake and that the United States should see China’s contemporary rulers as kindred spirits in terms of their approach to politics and the environment. Given the problems that exist between the United States and China at the moment, it appears unlikely that the author’s efforts will be successful in terms of his political agenda. Even the author’s desire to celebrate the West as a potential place for radical leftist politics fails because the author has nothing to say about the reality of those politics when they have been practiced in the contemporary West. He correctly notes the way that Oregonians despise Californians (one of their more noble qualities, it must be admitted), but has nothing to say about the disastrous rule of Democrats over the West and the way that it has led to an explosive problem in homelessness and the flight of many people to other regions to escape the ills of Democratic rule. Ultimately, this book falls short in its intents to provide a Pacific history to rival that of Atlantic historians, but it does manage to provide a long-winded screed about the author’s own political biases and pro-CCP propaganda efforts.