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The Sassoons: The Great Global Merchants and the Making of an Empire
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About This Book
A spectacular generational saga of the making (and undoing) of a family 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.
Reviews
"Sassoon is drawn to neat moral narratives, which come at the expense of economic explanations ..."
"The Sassoon family tree is complicated, and keeping characters straight throughout the narrative can be daunting, particularly since the family repeated names constantly."
"[A] scholarly and wide-ranging corporate and family history, which deftly charts their exploitation of the British Empire, before the sticky embrace of the English aristocracy suffocated their commercial ambition ..."
"Although the business-heavy narrative can be demanding...the reader is well rewarded with some pitch-perfect cameos ..."
"Despite being a distant relative to his titular subject, Sassoon maintains a historian's impartiality ..."
"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."
"A revelatory rise-and-fall narrative of a secretive clan who pursued wealth but mostly shunned fame and power ..."
"It is the Sassoons' fall from fortune that gives this somewhat dry family history its emotional heart and narrative pace ..."
"The rise and fall of the Sassoon family, who, at their height, traded in opium, tea, silk and jewels, is charted in delectable detail in The Sassoons ..."
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