Political attitudes towards Zionism have usually been interpreted as being closely related to the racial nationalism that developed towards the end of the nineteenth century. In this new study, Donald Lewis traces the development of deep-rooted religious impulses behind Christian Zionism in nineteenth-century Britain and its influence upon missionary work, political and diplomatic activity. Lewis focuses upon the life and career of Anthony Ashley Cooper, the seventh earl of Shaftesbury (1801–85), to demonstrate how an intense interest in mission to Jews and their restoration to Palestine became an important feature of the developing identity of Protestant Evangelicalism during the 1830s and 1840s. Central to the developing outlook was a belief in the prophetic divine destiny of the Jewish people to have a national homeland in Palestine and that Christians were obliged to work towards this. Lewis subtly analyses developments in Evangelicalism, building on recent scholarship that has moved to interpret British developments more within a broader international context, highlighting important continental networks and, in particular, the importance of links to German Pietism. The book is also rich in contextual detail on the political and diplomatic complexities involved in the activities of Britain and the other European powers in Palestine. Lewis convincingly demonstrates how the campaigns to establish a British consul, to build an Anglican Church in Jerusalem and inaugurate a joint Anglican-Lutheran bishopric in 1841 drew British interests into the Holy Land politically and diplomatically at a time when Ottoman power was weakening and the strategic importance of the area was becoming increasingly recognised. As philosemitism and British foreign policy interests became mutually supportive from the mid- and later nineteenth century, they became closely associated in a world view that contributed significantly to the issuing of the Balfour Declaration (1917) and was to have a longer term legacy into contemporary world politics.