This morning, before you were fully awake, you held a conquest in your hand. It was just the cup.

The white porcelain of your mug was a secret Europe couldn't crack for a thousand years. The shine on your spoon came out of a silver mountain fed with human lives. The red of your table was a felled rainforest, the shell of your buttons was hauled up by divers who never came up right. None of it announced itself. Every object in the room had a mouth, and kept it shut.

The Empire Is the Decorator: Ten Everyday Objects and the Empires Hidden in Your Home tells the dramatic story of how the plunder of five centuries turned into your furniture.

From the porcelain kilns of China to the silver mines of the Andes, from the whaling grounds of the Pacific to a clockmaker's forty-year obsession, this narrative history brings the empires home through ten ordinary objects. Behind the things you touch without thinking were stolen secrets, stripped forests, drowned divers, and lives spent by the thousand for a luxury you now own a cheap copy of.

• Why kings once traded soldiers for a row of Chinese jars • How the silver in your kitchen drawer was dug by the drafted dead • Why the red wood of fine furniture was a rainforest and a slave route • How your shirt buttons cost divers their lungs and their lives • What a burning candle had to do with a whale killed in a far ocean • How one man's forty-year sea-clock helped an island rule the sea • Why porcelain was the material all of Europe couldn't make • How empire wove its hours, habits, and idea of ownership into daily life • Why the room forgets the conquest, and how the objects were made to

This was not simply decoration. It was the residue of some of history's greatest crimes, arranged neatly on your shelves.

The objects around you carry real beauty and real craft. They also carry a cost that was paid, out of sight, by people you will never meet.

Step into the kilns, mines, and ocean floors where your home was quietly furnished, and meet the emperors, merchants, and forgotten hands who made the empire you live inside.