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 South, Central, and West Asia, dives into the captivating narratives behind twelve iconic carpets. She reveals how these textiles have symbolized power and status throughout history, sought after by emperors and captured in major historical events. Armstrong highlights the often overlooked stories of the weavers behind these masterpieces, especially women in Iran. By intertwining art and politics, she challenges conventional perceptions and emphasizes the cultural significance embedded in these stunning creations.

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ANECDOTE

From Home Rugs To Scholarly Career

Dorothy Armstrong retrained academically after living with carpets and curiosity drove her to study their histories.
She completed diplomas and a PhD to turn a personal fascination into a professional specialty.

INSIGHT

Carpets As Elite Propaganda

Armstrong argues carpets were elite propaganda: rare textiles displayed global reach and dominance.
Western elites used Eastern carpets to signal wealth, power, and access to exotic goods.

INSIGHT

Reading Weaves To Recover Makers

Close study of a carpet's weave reveals makers' working practices and relationships.
Armstrong uses 'imaginative triangulation' with textiles, fieldwork, and documents to recover hidden weavers' lives.

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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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