The Sassoons
The Great Global Merchants and the Making of an Empire
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3.9 • 10 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
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.
“Engaging...compelling...well-paced and supremely satisfying. ”—The New York Times
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Georgetown University historian Sassoon (Anatomy of Authoritarianism in the Arab Republics) profiles in this grand if somewhat plodding account the branch of the Sassoon family that built a global trading empire after leaving Baghdad for Bombay in the 1820s. Sassoon, whose own branch of the family remained in Baghdad, describes his ancestor Sheikh Sassoon ben Saleh Sassoon's role as the city's chief treasurer and the persecution under Ottoman ruler Sultan Mahmud II that forced the Jewish family to flee to India. Sheikh Sassoon's second eldest son, David, began trading textiles in the 1830s, before expanding the business to include opium and cotton and getting seven of his eight sons involved in running offices of the family firm in England, China, India, Japan, and elsewhere. Success brought assimilation into upper-class society in England—where most of David's sons and their families had relocated by the end of the 19th century—and complacency about the business; with few family members willing to move to Asia to run it, outsiders took over. 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.
