‘Agir à l’anglaise’ - Britain, France and Russia in the Imperial mirror, 1814 - 1914

This paper offers an overview of the pooling and sharing of knowledge between the British, French and Russian empires in the 19th century. It begins by exploring how far the Russian ruling elite saw the British and French Empires as exemplars and borrowed techniques and tools of conquest and rule from them, before looking at how far this was reciprocated, and at Russian views of the Asian empires that were its neighbours - the Ottoman Empire, China and Japan.