Threads of Empire: A History of the World in Twelve Carpets

A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF 2025

‘A fascinating alternative history covering 2,500 years and a geographical span from Japan to California’ NEW STATESMAN
‘A revelation . . . The tale of each carpet as Armstrong tells it is untidy and tragic and comical all at once’ TESSA HADLEY

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.

Threads of Empire 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.