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, delves into the fascinating history embodied in carpets. She reveals how these textiles reflect power dynamics, spirituality, and cultural narratives throughout time. Armstrong discusses the stark divide between wealthy carpet consumers and the artisans who create them, highlighting women's historical struggles in the craft. From the ancient Paziric carpet to imperial Ottoman legacies, her insights weave a rich tapestry of history and artistry.

Ask episode

AI Snips

Chapters

Books

Transcript

Episode notes

INSIGHT

Technical Clues Reveal Social Life

Technical clues like the 'lazy line' reveal collaborative weaving and two-person production.
Close attention to technique conjures scenes of weavers, their relationships, and daily practices.

ANECDOTE

Ardabil Carpets: Shrine And State

The Ardabil pair were court-woven carpets in a mosque audience hall where the Shah received foreign ambassadors.
They fused devotional awe with imperial display by bridging spiritual site and royal diplomacy.

INSIGHT

Rugs As Wartime Testimony

War rugs from Afghanistan document lived trauma, depicting tanks, planes, and dead bodies as woven testimony.
Markets and outside artists sometimes shaped these motifs, creating complex origin stories.

Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode

Get the app

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.

YouTube Channel here

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture