Threads of empire A history of the world in twelve carpets

Carpets and rugs have always gripped British historian and rug collector Armstrong (Ashmolean Museum, Univ. of Oxford) and compelled her to write this history of the world, spanning 500 BCE to the 20th century, told through 12 carpets woven along the Asian Silk Road between Europe and Japan. Through a description of each rug and its creation, design, condition, and acquisition, Armstrong unfolds world history in the carpet's era. She also wonders about the lives of the largely unrecorded nomadic weavers, most of them women, who created these rugs. The book also features the stories of chieftains, kings, forgers, obsessed ultra-rich rug collectors, and museum curators. VERDICT This well-written and extremely interesting book will attract a wide audience in both world history and the decorative arts.--Mark Jones

Weaving in the world. Armstrong, a historian of the material culture of Asia, investigates the political, economic, and cultural role of handwoven carpets, splendid artifacts of superb craftsmanship. Her meticulously researched survey focuses on 12 carpets, from a knotted-pile rug from Siberia, dating from the 3rd or 4th century B.C.E., to a 21st-century rug woven in Pakistan for commercial export. Even as early as the Iron Age the painstaking technology of rug-making already had evolved into a mature art form, likely carried out by nomads. From earliest times, Armstrong asserts, carpet weavers have been women, honing their skills in carding, spinning, dyeing, knotting, setting warps and wefts, and designing or reproducing patterns. Considerable skill, as well, Armstrong has found, is involved in rug restoration and repair. For centuries, rugs have been associated with the rich and powerful: Potentates, chieftains, robber barons, and collectors considered the acquisition of prized rugs as a reflection of their own status. Attribution of a rug's creation and provenance also connects to power. The startling beauty of a particular rug in the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum led to the assumption that it was made by a team of men. That conclusion, Armstrong asserts, "suited a nineteenth-century Western view which held that if an object was art then it was created by men, and that what women practised was a lesser form of creativity described in the West as craft." Armstrong reveals the exploitation of rug makers that continues to the present. Twenty-first-century rugs sold in department stores are often crafted by "weary refugees in makeshift encampments" who create products for international trade to design and color specifications and are marketed through export houses. Nevertheless, as Armstrong's richly detailed history shows, even modern rugs can shimmer with glamor and mystique. An intriguing, revelatory historical perspective. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.