The Impact of the West on the Carpets of Qajar Era

Despite the fact that many branches of art and craft were affected by the ideas of Western modernity in the Qajar era including painting, architecture, poetry, literature and handicrafts, carpet-weaving art preserved its cultural traditions and mainly represented its traditional motifs and designs. The present paper aims to study the economics and the situation of carpet-weaving in the Qajar era, to understand how production relationships and the presence of foreign companies affected the development of the traditional carpet weaving of Qajar era, and also to know what the role of consumer markets of the West was in the preservation of traditional design and motifs of carpets in this epoch. This research is a historical-descriptive- analytical research in terms of nature and method, where desk study method has been used for data collection. The research reveals some results which show that an increase in the exports of Qajari carpets as well as the presence of foreign investments in the carpet-weaving areas of Iran, resulted from the impact of the Western consumers markets, were decisive factors in maintaining and the preservation of traditional designs and motifs of Qajari carpets.