ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on the emergence of the Persian carpet as a modern commodity, from its mid-nineteenth-century upsurge as a civilizational and imperial commodity to its transformation into a national and diasporic commodity in the present. It shows how this process was accomplished through a series of discourses that come to us from connoisseur books, magazines, movies, films, images, and websites, or what the author calls "commodity culture." The chapter argues that Oriental carpets were aestheticized and not only functioned as fetish objects that concealed the labor and conditions under which they were produced but also became what the author calls mnemonic objects that help people remember what was lost or transformed in colonial modernity and modern capitalism. It examines why Persian carpets became a commodity in the context of empire and, later on, in the process of nation formation in Iran.
