The Global Merchants

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.

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.A tale reminiscent of Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks … Not only is this a powerful human story but it also carries contemporary resonance in a time when great fortunes are again being made—Stefan Wagstyl, Financial Times

The engrossing story of the meteoric rise and calamitous fall of the Sassoons, set against the backdrop of peak British imperialism … what a scintillating show it was while it lasted, as this vivid and richly researched book reveals—Justin Marozzi, The Sunday Times

A very readable, sensitive and original account of a remarkable family, deftly weaving together the history of the business, the history of the family and their place in the wider history of Britain, India and China—David Abulafia, Spectator

Sassoon’s assiduous mining of the archives has produced a family history writ large … the story of the Sassoons’ rise from Ottoman Baghdadis to incalculably wealthy figures of the British Establishment is fascinating—Anne de Courcy, Daily Telegraph

Logan Roy might do well to read The Global Merchants for tips … a tale of commercial derring-do and dissection of the paperwork, the exigencies of calm, but rapid, decision-making that could could lead to boom or bust—Paul French, South Morning China Post

Methodical, deeply researched and presented with considered care … Sassoon’s book isn’t just a marvellous yarn, it’s an Ottoman ‘Our Crowd’ that gives his family its due’—Adam Rathe, The New York Times

A marvellous epitaph to a monumental family, makers of several worlds and keepers of none—Norman Lebrecht, Wall Street JournalJoseph Sassoon is Professor of History and Political Economy and Director of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies 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. His ancestors were forcibly separated from the Sassoons of this book early in the nineteenth century, but he is fluent in the languages they spoke and the obscure Judeo-Arabic script – indecipherable to previous historians – they used in their private communications, which are the foundation of this book.GB