The astonishing story of the Sassoons, one of the nineteenth
century's preeminent commercial families and 'the Rothschilds of
the East' The Sassoons were one of the great business dynasties of
the nineteenth century, as eminent as traders as the Rothschilds
were bankers. This book reveals the secrets behind the family's
phenomenal success: how a handful of Jewish exiles from Ottoman
Baghdad forged a mercantile juggernaut from their new home in
colonial Bombay, the vast network of agents, informants and
politicians they built, and the way they came to bridge East and
West, culturally as well as commercially. As one competitor
remarked, 'silver and gold, silks, gums and spices, opium and
cotton, wool and wheat - whatever moves over sea or land feels the
hand or bears the mark of Sassoon & Co.' Drawing for the first
time on the vast family archives, Joseph Sassoon brings vividly to
life a succession of remarkable characters. From a single
generation: Flora, the first woman to steer a major global
business, Siegfried, the poet, and Victor, the tycoon who drew the
stars of Hollywood's silent era to his skyscraper in Shanghai.
Through the lives these ambitious figures built for themselves in
London, Bombay and beyond, the reader is drawn into a captivating
world of politics and power, innovation and intrigue, high society
and empire. The Global Merchants is thus at once an intimate
portrait of a single family and a panorama of the hundred and
thirty years of their prominence: from the Opium Wars and opening
of China to the American Civil War, the establishment of the
British Raj to India's independence. Together these give a fresh
perspective on the evolution of one of the defining forces of their
age and the present: globalization. The Sassoons were variously its
agents, advocates and casualties, and watching them moving through
the world, we perceive the making of our own.
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