A NEW YORKER<\/i> BEST BOOK OF 2025<\/b><\/p>\n
‘A fascinating alternative history covering 2,500 years and a geographical span from Japan to California’ NEW STATESMAN<\/i><\/b>
‘A revelation . . . The tale of each carpet as Armstrong tells it is untidy and tragic and comical all at once’ TESSA HADLEY<\/b><\/p>\n
On the saddles of warlords, draping the walls of palaces, under the feet of presidents, dictators and religious leaders: where there is power, there have been carpets.<\/b><\/p>\n
Threads of Empire<\/i> is a vivid new history of global power told through the stories of the world’s most fascinating rugs. From colonial bureaucrats to Lutheran priests, oil barons to Islamic rules, Scythian chieftains to Churchill and Stalin, textile scholar Dorothy Armstrong explores how these objects have always travelled in the slipstream of power – and how the unwritten histories of those who made them are woven into the fabric beneath our feet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 this book, 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"product_brand":[],"product_cat":[75],"product_tag":[882,648],"class_list":["post-113143","product","type-product","status-publish","product_cat-history","product_tag-antiques-collectables-carpets-rugs-textiles","product_tag-general-world-history","pa_book_author-armstrong-dorothy","pa_cover-paperback","pa_dewey-746-79-edition23","pa_imprint-weidenfeld-nicolson","pa_language-english","pa_pages-8261","pa_publisher-weidenfeld-nicolson","pa_readership-general-trade-code-k","first","instock","taxable","shipping-taxable","purchasable","product-type-simple"],"yoast_head":"\n