The collective monograph is devoted to the study of the cognitive-rhetorical strategies of prominent British and Russian intellectuals in the situation of the systemic crisis of the "transitional era" and the formation of cultural national imperial identities in Britain and Russia of the 17th-18th centuries. Based on a historical and comparative analysis of the cultural code of the emerging British and Russian identities based on the material of polemical works, sermons and travelogues of the XVII-XVIII centuries. it is considered the general and special in the practices and mechanisms of influence of intellectuals on power and society in Britain and Russia in the situation of the collapse of the universal picture of the world and the formation of new ideas about man, society and the state.