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The Great Global Merchants and the Making of an Empire
by Joseph Sassoon
A spectacular generational saga of the making (and undoing) of a family dynasty: the riveting untold story of the gilded Jewish Bagdadi Sassoons, who built a vast empire through global finance and trade - cotton, opium, shipping, banking - that reached across three continents and ultimately changed the destinies of nations. With full access to rare family photographs and archives.
They were one of the richest families in the world for two hundred years, from the 19th century to the 20th, and were known as 'the Rothschilds of the East.'
Mesopotamian in origin, and for more than forty years the chief treasurers to the pashas of Baghdad and Basra, they were forced to flee to Bushir on the Persian Gulf; David Sassoon and sons starting over with nothing, and beginning to trade in India in cotton and opium.
The Sassoons soon were building textile mills and factories, and setting up branches in shipping in China, and expanding beyond, to Japan, and further west, to Paris and London. They became members of British parliament; were knighted; and owned and edited Britain's leading newspapers, including The Sunday Times and The Observer.
And in 1887, the exalted dynasty of Sassoon joined forces with the banking empire of Rothschild and were soon joined by marriage, fusing together two of the biggest Jewish commerce and banking families in the world.
Against the monumental canvas of two centuries of the Ottoman Empire and the changing face of the Far East, across Europe and Great Britain during the time of its farthest reach, Joseph Sassoon gives us a riveting generational saga of the making of this magnificent family dynasty.
"Historian Sassoon draws on extensive family, business, and historical archives to create a richly detailed, incisive portrait of the wealthy, influential Sassoons...Following down through the decades, the author constructs a sweeping social, cultural, and economic history. A stately historical study of a wealthy and influential family." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Though dense, the narrative is enlivened by portraits of illustrious family members including Farha Sassoon, who successfully ran the Bombay headquarters of the business after her husband's death in 1894, and WWI poet Siegfried Sassoon. The result is an impressive deep dive into a family that bridged East and West as they built—and lost—an empire." - Publishers Weekly
"A meticulously detailed account of the rise and fall of a mercantile dynasty that will appeal to casual history buffs and academics alike." - Library Journal
"The Sassoons' remarkable contribution to the history of Western globalization, cosmopolitanism, urban development and decorative art has been concealed. Now Joseph Sassoon has resurfaced that legacy with this scholarly and wide-ranging corporate and family history, which deftly charts their exploitation of the British Empire, before the stick embrace of the English aristocracy suffocated their commercial ambition." - Times Literary Supplement (UK)
"They built, Sassoon suggests, the first truly global business, able to grasp the connection between the silk harvest in France and the price of rice in Shanghai, or the way that sugar in Java could be sold at a profit in India. That they lost this panoptic capacity, settling instead for a cosy and blinkered parochialism, is the great tragedy that underpins this fascinating book." - Guardian (UK)
"The Sassoons were the ultimate imperial dynasty, Mesopotamian Jews who made their money trading opium between British India and Qing China. Like Amschel Rothschild, David Sassoon deployed his sons to create a multinational family firm. Like the Romans, the Sassoons split their empire into Western and Eastern halves. And like Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks, the Sassoon family depleted their entrepreneurial spirit in pursuit of social acceptance, some part of which was always withheld. This is a deeply researched, wonderfully rich account of a family that, perhaps more than any other, personified British imperialism in all its ambivalence." - Niall Ferguson, author of The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World
"The extraordinary, compelling story of the rise and fall of the Sassoon family. It begins like a detective novel, and moves from the Ottoman Archives in Istanbul to private, official and business archives in Delhi, Hong Kong and Jerusalem. [The Sassoons] recounts the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century commerce, in opium, pearls and cotton mills, from Baghdad and Bombay to London and Shanghai. The Sassoons made their fortunes in the British Empire, and their destiny is also a story of having become too English, amidst the end of empire." - Emma Rothschild, author of An Infinite History: The Story of a Family in France Over Three Centuries
This information about The Sassoons was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Joseph Sassoon is Professor of History and Politics at Georgetown University. He is also a Senior Associate Member at St. Antony's College, Oxford and a Trustee of the Bodleian Library. His previous books include the prize-winning Saddam Hussein's Ba'th Party, The Iraqi Refugees and The Anatomy of Authoritarianism in the Arab Republics.
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