Spies and Scholars

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A Financial Times Best Book of the Year, this work reveals how Russian espionage in imperial China influenced the rise of the Russian Empire as a global power. Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, Russia actively sought information about China, employing tactics such as bribing porcelain-makers for trade secrets, dispatching Buddhist monks for intelligence-gathering, and training students at its Orthodox mission in Beijing to spy. Knowledge production occurred not only at elite institutions like the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg but also in various diplomatic and military settings. Gregory Afinogenov highlights the evolving nature of the knowledge Russia pursued, which shifted in response to changing state objectives and its perceived global standing. Initially, Russian bureaucrats concentrated on China and the Siberian frontier, relying heavily on spies, including Jesuit scholars. By the early nineteenth century, as geopolitical tensions with Britain emerged, Russia's focus turned to public intellectual work, integrating knowledge of the East into academic discourse. Although these knowledge regimes often fell short of providing strategic or commercial advantages, they significantly impacted the exchange of information between Russia and Europe, shaping the interaction between China and Western empires. Drawing on extensive archival research, this book challenges established views on the relationship betw