Imperial Threads: Motifs and Artisans from Turkey, Iran and India

In Imperial Threads, the loom becomes a map of empire, migration and stylistic collision — a place where artisans in Turkey, Iran and India weave not just cloth but conversation between dynasties, courts and workshops. The volume takes as its focus the major early‑modern Islamic realms — Ottoman, Timurid, Safavid and Mughal — and asks how motifs and makers crossed borders, how the “imperial” was made tactile in warp and weft. The reader is invited to look not just at grand surface decoration but at the hands behind the pattern: the patron commissioning, the artisan executing, the motif migrating. In doing so, the book plays for the textile‑attuned eye: you are encouraged to slow‑see the palmettes, arabesques, medallions and repeat‑bands not simply as decoration but as trace of movement, influence, workshop lineage.

Rather than a straight‑forward catalogue, this is a material culture journey: essays explore technique, commerce, patronage, and the very idea of “imperial style” — how motifs are adopted, adapted and transformed across geography and century. The visual presentation honours the cloth: generous full‑colour plates, strong lighting, high‑resolution detail, all set in a format that lets the texture and weave matter. For the kind of reader who delights in cotton and silk, dye and draft, the book becomes a gateway to a world where the loop of a thread can mean diplomacy, gift‑exchange, conquest and continuity.

About the Author
Mounia Chekhab‑Abudaya is a scholar specialising in Islamic art and textiles, particularly in the early‑modern geographical intersection of Turkey, Iran and India. Her work emphasises material culture, artisan networks and the migration of motifs. In this volume, her editorial vision unites historically rich objects with documentary clarity, bringing together specialists and rich imagery to uncover the textile infrastructures of empire.

Publication date: 2018
Publisher: River Books
Pages: 200
ISBN: 9788836636174