History underfoot and on display
Threads of Empire: A History of the World in Twelve Carpets by Dorothy Armstrong (St. Martin’s Press, 2025)
Reviewed by Elizabeth Stice
Is it possible to tell the history of the world in twelve carpets? Perhaps not quite, but it is possible to write world history organized around twelve carpets. In Dorothy Armstrong’s Threads of Empire, each carpet has its own story, but also serves as a pocket door to a broader historical moment or topic. One carpet takes us to the Yalta Conference in 1945, one takes us to pre-Meiji Japan, one takes us to Siberia before the AD period, and others take us other interesting places. Each carpet is an occasion to consider a time and place, typically an empire, and a relationship to power.
Threads of Empire is not built exclusively on famous carpets nor is it an attempt to catalog the “best” carpets in the world. Some carpets in the book are famous enough to be known by non-experts, like the Ardabil carpet. At least one carpet in the book is a “fake.” Some are authentic but relatively unknown. Through deft story-telling, Armstrong has managed to write an interesting book about rugs for a general audience. She covers what we know about production methods, opens our eyes to those who likely made each carpet, and shares its journey from point of origin to museum or private collection. Many different cultures, personalities, and time periods are involved.
The chapters in Threads of Empire have the ability to draw in the reader and take us to unexpected places. A good example is the chapter on a knotted-pile carpet from sixteenth century Anatolia, which wound up in the Black Church in Braşov, Transylvania. In this chapter, Armstrong explains and how and why so many prayer rugs made by Muslims wound up in churches, as rugs to warm parishioners and sometimes as objects on the pulpit or altar. This chapter takes us to the forefront of Lutheranism and its plain churches in sixteenth-century Carpathia, which we experience through the story of Johannes Honterus and the Black Church. From there, we follow the Saxons of Transylvania, and local Lutheranism, through successive centuries and empires. And we follow prayer rugs on their journey from the Ottoman Empire as trade goods and then, in later centuries, out of Carpathia to private collections, as they were smuggled out of churches, often sold without permission. Armstrong picks up one thread and follows it, while accounting for the intersecting threads and the patterns in history.
In many places, Armstrong brings our attention to power. Armstrong argues that carpets have often been symbols not only of wealth, but of power. The “empire” in Threads of Empire is intentional. Churchill and Stalin and FDR took that famous Yalta photo posed on carpets. Hitler had a copy of the Ardabil carpet. Yet most historic carpets were created by women and people who left little historical record—one carpet in this book was created by prisoners in British India. Many carpets have been made under government direction and strong external control. Armstrong continuously reminds us of the contrast between the creators of carpets, and what the carpets may have meant to them, and the ways in which carpets become symbols and are bought and sold at exorbitant prices by powerful people. The book’s tone is consistent with other critiques of empire, especially Western empires.
If the link between carpets and power is not entirely familiar, the relationship between time and textiles has long been observed. In Greek mythology, the Three Fates hold the thread of human life, one spinning, one measuring, and one cutting. In The Odyssey, Penelope weaves daily. The estimated time it should take her to complete her work has been recognized by her suitors as an acceptable unit of time for her to mourn for her missing husband. Unwilling to move on, she unweaves nightly, holding out hope for Odysseus that stretches across years. Time and textiles travel together. Native American wampum belts tell stories in their intricately woven beads. Quilts chronicle family history. In the 2008 movie Wanted—famous for the curving bullet scene—a group of assassins respond to orders handed out by the “Loom of Fate.”
If time and textiles are obviously linked, writing about carpets is also a good way of showing the warp and weft of history as a discipline. Threads of Empire highlights the strengths and weaknesses of existing scholarship and methods. In some cases, we can fairly easily assign point of origin for carpets and offer solid dating for them. Our knowledge of empires and museums helps us assess the context of many carpets. In other cases, we have only a range of possible times and a list of possible places. For some carpets, we know very little about the original context. In almost every case, design interpretation has been anything but reliable by earlier experts. Previous interpretations have not only been erroneous but have sometimes been driven by bad motives. All the ways in which we can and cannot understand carpets with the knowledge and tools we have reflect the power and the limits of history as a discipline.
At times Threads of Empire presses against the borders of history as a discipline. This book walks the line between comfortable and uncomfortable use of historical imagination in nonfiction. Armstrong builds many paragraphs on assumptions or phrases like “we can imagine.” At times that can be unsettling for a historian. However, Armstrong is always clear about her approach. Her attempts to help us enter the historical moment through imagination are not disguised. In many cases, they do help us reflect on carpets and contexts in rich ways. And these exercises are clear responses to gaps in the historical record. We do not know what kind of a sight Toyotomi Hideyoshi made in his jinbaori made from an Iranian kilim. We do not even know if he ever wore it. We can only imagine it. Armstrong encourages us to do so.
Threads of Empire is intriguing in part because of its ability to weave together the familiar and the unfamiliar. The V&A Museum appears, as does the British Empire. So does the Ottoman Empire and the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. We also encounter nomadic people, ancient Siberia, central Europe, and legendary carpet experts. It would be hard to imagine a reader picking up the book and being disappointed by too familiar contents.
One clear takeaway is the emphasis on the significance of Persia and especially the Safavid Empire. Armstong not only demonstrates the reach of their cultural goods, but argues for much more knowledge of them by other empires and conscious appeal to their image. That is debatable at points—was Hideyoshi consciously referencing Persian empire with his apparel?—but altogether Armstrong succeeds in helping us see what was before us, even underfoot, but perhaps missed by non-experts.
Threads of Empire is an altogether interesting book. It is clearly written and can engage the general audience well. While many people might assume they would not enjoy a book about carpets, many of them would be in error about that. Good history helps us see connections between peoples, times, and places, and uses narrative to enrich our understanding of the world around us. Threads of Empire does just that.
Elizabeth Stice is a professor of history and assistant director of the honors program at Palm Beach Atlantic University. When she can, she reads and writes about World War I and she is the author of Empire Between the Lines: Imperial Culture in British and French Trench Newspapers of the Great War (2023).
