Joseph Sassoon - The Sassoons

The Sassoons: 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 Bushehr on the Persian Gulf; David Sassoon and his sons started over with nothing and beginning to trade in India in cotton and opium.

The Sassoons soon were building textile mills and factories, 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 was 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.

In an interview with you, Joseph Sassoon will speak about:

His passion for discovery that led to an untapped trove of archival material about his family
The incredible contributions of this family to Western Globalization and cos
The Allure of wealth and the social ladder climbing that ultimately cause the dynasty’s downfall
Sir Victor Sassoon, His Brilliance, and where he ultimately failed
The comparisons of the Sassoon to the Rothschild dynasties
The letter from a distant relative that was the inspiration for this book
His family's escape from Baghdad in the 1970’s to avoid Saddam Hussein’s regime
and much more!

Publisher‏: ‎ Pantheon (October 25, 2022)

Language‏: ‎ English

Hardcover‏: ‎ 432 pages

ISBN-10‏: ‎ 0593316592

ISBN-13‏: ‎ 978-0593316597

About the Author

JOSEPH SASSOON is a Professor of History and Political Economy at Georgetown's Center for Contemporary Arab Studies and holds the al-Sabah Chair in Politics and Political Economy of the Arab World. He is also a Senior Associate Member at St Antony’s College, Oxford. His research interests include political economy, economic history, Iraq, Iraqi refugees, and authoritarianism.

Sassoon’s second book, The Iraqi Refugees: The New Crisis in the Middle East, about Iraqi Refugees, (London, I.B. Tauris, 2009) is a comprehensive study of the Iraqi refugees and the impact of their displacement on their home and host countries after the 2003 invasion. In 2013, his book Saddam Hussein’s Ba‘th Party: Inside an Authoritarian Regime (Cambridge University Press, 2012) won the prestigious British-Kuwait Prize for the best book on the Middle East. His most recent book is Anatomy of Authoritarianism in the Arab Republics (New York: Cambridge University, 2016). Sassoon completed his Ph.D. at St Antony’s College, Oxford. and has published extensively on Iraq and its economy and on the Middle East.