"Original and refreshing. Graves tells the stories of the diggers, skilled forgers, dealers, and brokers who extracted objects and fragments, created whole objects from sherds or made fakes, and worked to develop museum or personal collections to satisfy fictive histories. Invisible Hands is a compelling account that links Tehran and Aleppo with Paris and New York, demonstrating the connections between Orientalism and capitalism at a specific moment in time ."--Edward S. Cooke, Jr., author of Global Objects: Toward a Connected Art History "In telling new and old stories about objects and their makers, Margaret Graves magisterially brings to light the work of overlooked craftsmen who (re)created these artifacts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries--not in moralizing tones or in the attempt at unveiling fakes--but by giving due credit to their skills and abilities. One rarely has the pleasure of reading such a well-written book." --Martina Rugiadi, coauthor of Court and Cosmos: The Great Age of the Seljuqs "This book marks a rare achievement in any discipline.

By excavating the margins of disciplinary practice, it undermines the premises that ground its center. What we learn is not how and why people in a distant time and place made art, so much as how modernity recycled such objects and histories to serve new economic and national ideological needs. Invisible Hands brilliantly changes the conversation about the types of narratives art history is capable of telling." --Wendy M. K. Shaw, author of Possessors and Possessed: Museums, Archaeology, and the Visualization of History in the Late Ottoman Empire "This pathbreaking book destigmatizes forgery, arguing for its inclusion as a significant category of artistic production in the modern Middle East. The beauty of Margaret Graves's writing, her empathetic reinsertion of these ceramic artists into the story of collecting, and her remarkable detective work using scientific testing and simple close looking make this a work of serious importance that will have a lasting legacy. Invisible Hands represents a paradigm shift and will be widely read and discussed within the field of Islamic art and beyond it.

" --Stephennie Mulder, author of The Shrines of the 'Alids in Medieval Syria.