Dorothy Armstrong, "Threads of Empire: A History of the World in Twelve Carpets" (St. Martin's Press, 2025)

Sep 10, 2025

Dorothy Armstrong, a historian specializing in the material culture of Asia, takes listeners on a captivating journey through her book about carpets. She reveals how these textiles symbolize power and status while showcasing the often unseen lives of the weavers behind them. Armstrong discusses the historical significance of carpets in various cultures, from the Scythian tombs to the Yalta Conference. She also highlights the vital contributions of women weavers and challenges misconceptions about nomadic versus settled societies. Expect a rich tapestry of art, politics, and history!

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ANECDOTE

From Home Rugs To Academic Career

Dorothy Armstrong began as a household enthusiast with inherited carpets and pursued formal study later.
She retrained at SOAS and the V&A, then completed an MA and PhD in carpet history.

INSIGHT

Carpets As Symbols Of Power

Carpets functioned as elite propaganda tools showing owners' access to rare Eastern goods.
Dorothy Armstrong links carpets in portraits to demonstrations of global power and status.

INSIGHT

Selecting Carpets To Tell World History

Armstrong picked twelve carpets to reveal global routes, timeframes, and social contexts rather than to rank the best.
She chose pieces that illuminate the Silk Roads, West/South/Central Asia, and colonial-era Europe.

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A spellbinding look at the history of the world through the stories of twelve carpets

Beautiful, sensuous, and enigmatic, great carpets follow power. Emperors, shahs, sultans and samurai crave them as symbols of earthly domination. Shamans and priests desire them to evoke the spiritual realm. The world's 1% hunger after them as displays of extreme status. And yet these seductive objects are made by poor and illiterate weavers, using the most basic materials and crafts; hedgerow plants for dyes, fibres from domestic animals, and the millennia-old skills of interweaving warps, wefts and knots.

In Threads of Empire: A History of the World in Twelve Carpets (St. Martin's Press, 2025), Dorothy Armstrong tells the histories of some of the world's most fascinating carpets, exploring how these textiles came into being then were transformed as they moved across geography and time in the slipstream of the great. She shows why the world's powerful were drawn to them, but also asks what was happening in the weavers' lives, and how they were affected by events in the world outside their tent, village or workshop.

In its wide-ranging examination of these dazzling objects, from the 5th century BCE contents of the tombs of Scythian chieftains, to the carpets under the boots of Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill at the 1945 Yalta Peace Conference, Threads of Empire uncovers a new, hitherto hidden past right beneath our feet.

Dorothy Armstrong is a historian of the material culture of South, Central and West Asia. She has taught at the Royal College of Art, Edinburgh College of Art and the University of Oxford. She was the Beattie Fellow in Carpet Studies at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, where she is now honorary research fellow. Threads of Empire is her first book.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

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