Invisible Hands: Fabrication, Forgery, and the Art of Islamic Ceramics

The remarkable history of forged and fabricated Islamic ceramics, their makers, and their unique role in colonial trade

In the heyday of Islamic art collecting around the turn of the twentieth century, thousands of premodern ceramic objects circulated on the international antiquities market. Invisible Hands tells the story of how traditional craft skills of the Islamic world, often thought to have died out with the advent of industrialization, were redirected toward a thriving new market in the colonial era: the fabrication and fictionalizing of antiquities, especially ceramics.

In this stunning work of art history, Margaret Graves shakes the foundations of the discipline, challenging us to reconsider what is and is not art. She traces how sophisticated fabrications--as modern as they were believed to be medieval--moved within an international network of diggers, dealers, and collectors who took advantage of a largely unregulated marketplace to exchange and amass objects that were fabulous in every sense of the word. She looks at canonical artworks as well as many previously unpublished and rarely seen objects, shedding light on the astonishingly varied ways Islamic ceramics were altered and remade by highly skilled craftspeople to meet the demands of Western collectors. Shifting away from the moralizing stance of past studies on reconstructed Islamic ceramics, Graves shows how fabrication and forgery became a major site of participation in modern global capitalism and establishes an entirely new paradigm in the history of art.

Drawing on a substantive new body of provenance research, archaeology, economic history, and laboratory analysis, Invisible Hands centers previously marginalized objects, reframing the practices of fabrication and forgery as crucial forms of invention and artistic skill worthy of study and admiration.

Author: Margaret S. Graves
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 02/10/2026
Pages: 344
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 3.05lbs
Size: 10.80h x 7.80w x 1.10d
ISBN: 9780691279749


Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 11/01/2025

About the Author
Margaret S. Graves is the Adrienne Minassian Associate Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture in honor of Marilyn Jenkins-Madina at Brown University. Her books include Arts of Allusion: Object, Ornament, and Architecture in Medieval Islam; Ceramic Art (Princeton); and Making Modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean.