Threads of Empire: a history of the world in twelve carpets - Dr Dorothy Armstrong

Historian and textile scholar, Dr Dorothy Armstrong, tells the stories of the some of the world’s most fascinating rugs. 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.

From colonial bureaucrats to Lutheran priests, oil barons to Islamic rulers, Scythian chieftains to Churchill and Stalin, Dr 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 warps, wefts and knots of the fabric beneath our feet.

As she explores how these textiles came into being, and were then transformed as they moved across geography and time, Dr Armstrong shows why the world’s powerful were drawn to them.

She also looks at the lives of the weavers, who were often poor and illiterate, sometimes nomadic, and usually women, and how events in the world outside their tent, village or workshop affected them.

About the speaker

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. 

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