Threads of Destiny

Exploring empire, fashion and technology, a pathbreaking history of the renowned pashmina shawl and the concurrent lives of weavers in Scotland and British India.

In the late seventeenth century, Kashmir was renowned worldwide for the beauty of its pashmina shawls, woven from the fine, warm wool of the Tibetan mountain goat. Paisley was a provincial Scottish town where weavers produced plain cloth in homespun wool and flax. But by the 1800s, these Scottish weavers had become so adept at imitating Kashmiri shawls that their characteristic swirling colours and tear-drop motifs came to be known by a new name: ‘the Paisley pattern’. How did it happen?

Threads of Destiny is a fresh history of the celebrated Kashmiri shawl and the copies it inspired. Myra MacDonald tracks the rise of Paisley’s handloom weavers during the British Empire and Industrial Revolution, and the concomitant slide in fortunes of their Kashmiri counterparts. The shawl trade was driven by the vagaries of fashion and foreign conquest, and the pursuit of pashm wool spurred exploration, political intrigue and wars. Then in the late nineteenth century, handloom weavers in Paisley and Kashmir found their fates unexpectedly united, as the ascent of power looms swept them out of business.

MacDonald tells a riveting human story of empire, fashion and technology—and of the intertwined destinies of two peoples thousands of miles apart.