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A History of the World in Twelve Carpets
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, 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.
‘A carpet has many stories to tell, from the time and place where it was woven by hand through to the time and place where it was used and cherished. This book helps us to locate that object in a unique way thanks to the many layered perspective that the author offers interweaving the personal and global, the political and the cultural, the historic and the intangible into a narrative that puts carpets, perhaps unknowingly, at the centre of the human experience.’
Ben Evans, Editor, Hali Magazine
‘A fascinating exploration of the part twelve carpets have played in world events. Carpets, usually woven by nameless women, have been desired throughout history by sultans and holy men, tycoons and tyrants, and their histories shed light on power dynamics across the ages … the book contains exquisite images and descriptions of some of the rarest and most important carpets ever made … Always at the forefront of Armstrong’s accounts of these carpets are their anonymous makers: craftspeople, prisoners, women and children - marginalised, often itinerant, almost always on the wrong side of history.’
Lucy Moore, Literary Review
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