In the United States during the spring and summer of 2005, long-simmering debates over “intelligent design” came to a boiling point. Long a favorite of the Christian Right, which had never reconciled itself to some of the causal and temporal implications of modern biology and geology, intelligent design represents a revamped creationism, the antievolution belief that the world is too complicated to have been created in any way other than by the actions of a divine intelligent being. With court challenges looming, which if successful would potentially mandate that Kansas and Pennsylvania school districts teach supernatural doctrine in science classes; with President George W. Bush declaring in August 2005 that intelligent design ought to be taught; and with scientists mobilizing against such unwarranted political and religious intrusion into the science curriculum, this and the socalled avian  u looked like the hot-button issues of the fall political season.

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The orthodox wisdom of the last century holds that empire is a deeply conservative project of economic expansion, power and control bound up with a social civilisational mission. Certainly, the recrudescence of US imperial ambition in the early years of the twenty-first century is widely associated with the rise of neoconservatism, whereas the ubiquitous postcolonial sentiment of recent decades since the middle of last century is seen as a symptom of progressive liberalism standing against empire. But as Uday Mehta2 has reminded us in his review of nineteenth-century British imperial thought, empire is equally if not predominantly an economic and civilisational project of liberal capitalism, and so it is no accident that the present imperial phase is associated with neoliberalism as much as neoconservatism. Thus, in pursuit of inspiration, lineage, and historical support, George Bush attempted to vindicate his warring in Iraq and Afghanistan by harking back again and again to the great liberal icon, Woodrow Wilson. How, therefore, are we to explain this anomaly of an apparently conservative project of empire performed in terms of the best liberal tradition?

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