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This chapter elucidates the relationship between the Bahá’í movement, the English people who were attracted to it and the British Empire, focusing on the early twentieth century and especially the First World War period. As British troops expanded into the Ottoman Middle East during that conflict, all three intersected in ways that would prove pivotal for Bahá’í history, marking the beginning of that persecuted movement’s establishment as a major world religion. This chapter explains how individual historical actors, from the movement’s leadership in the Haifa–Acre area, to the Bahá’ís in England, to (although to a lesser extent) the British officers and administrators in Palestine, were able to sift through a variety of principles, beliefs and representations culturally available to them in order to create systems of meaning that made new Bahá’í–British relationships possible. Areas of common ground included certain shared liberal, democratic ideals; a global perspective that included people from many different ethnic, racial, religious and national backgrounds; and a willingness to cross familiar boundaries between “East” and “West,” even as those concepts were created and recreated in the process.
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