The Sassoons

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.

Tracing the global history of the Sassoon family, entrepreneurs and patrons of remarkable art and architecture, from Baghdad to Mumbai, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and London The Sassoons were prosperous as bankers and treasurers to the Ottoman sultans in nineteenth-century Baghdad, until they were driven out by religious persecution and economic pressures. Assuming the precarious status of stateless Jews, the family dispersed, establishing businesses in Mumbai, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and London. Their wealth enabled them to collect splendid works of art from the various cultures that welcomed them. This volume tells the sweeping global story of the Sassoon family through the works of art they collected. Lavishly illustrated with paintings, porcelain, manuscripts, Judaica, and architecture, it foregrounds family members who were patrons of art and sponsors of remarkable buildings, highlighting the role of the family's accomplished women. Rachel Sassoon was editor of both the Times and the Observer newspapers in London at the turn of the twentieth century. The renowned war poet Siegfried Sassoon was a cousin. Victor Sassoon hosted the glitterati of the 1920s and 1930s at his Cathay Hotel in Shanghai. This fascinating and elegant book--with gilt edges and a ribbon bookmark--features a family tree and explores generations of Sassoons for whom art was not only a mark of their arrival in the rarefied world of the upper class but a pleasure in itself. Published in association with the Jewish Museum, New York Exhibition Schedule: Jewish Museum, New York (March 3-August 13, 2023)

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.

"In vivid detail... examines the little-known history of two extraordinary dynasties."--The Boston Globe "Not just a brilliant, well-researched, and highly readable book about China's past, it also reveals the contingencies and ironic twists of fate in China's modern history."--LA Review of Books An epic, multigenerational story of two rival dynasties who flourished in Shanghai and Hong Kong as twentieth-century China surged into the modern era, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Shanghai, 1936. The Cathay Hotel, located on the city's famous waterfront, is one of the most glamorous in the world. Built by Victor Sassoon--billionaire playboy and scion of the Sassoon dynasty--the hotel hosts a who's who of global celebrities: Noel Coward has written a draft of Private Lives in his suite and Charlie Chaplin has entertained his wife-to-be. And a few miles away, Mao and the nascent Communist Party have been plotting revolution. By the 1930s, the Sassoons had been doing business in China for a century, rivaled in wealth and influence by only one other dynasty--the Kadoories. These two Jewish families, both originally from Baghdad, stood astride Chinese business and politics for more than 175 years, profiting from the Opium Wars; surviving Japanese occupation; courting Chiang Kai-shek; and losing nearly everything as the Communists swept into power. In The Last Kings of Shanghai, Jonathan Kaufman tells the remarkable history of how these families participated in an economic boom that opened China to the world, but remained blind to the country's deep inequality and to the political turmoil at their doorsteps. In a story stretching from Baghdad to Hong Kong to Shanghai to London, Kaufman enters the lives and minds of these ambitious men and women to forge a tale of opium smuggling, family rivalry, political intrigue, and survival. The book lays bare the moral compromises of the Kadoories and the Sassoons--and their exceptional foresight, success, and generosity. At the height of World War II, they joined together to rescue and protect eighteen thousand Jewish refugees fleeing Nazism. Though their stay in China started out as a business opportunity, the country became a home they were reluctant to leave, even on the eve of revolution. The lavish buildings they built and the booming businesses they nurtured continue to define Shanghai and Hong Kong to this day. As the United States confronts China's rise, and China grapples with the pressures of breakneck modernization and global power, the long-hidden odysseys of the Sassoons and the Kadoories hold a key to understanding the present moment.

David Sassoon (1792-1864) continued the family trading empire in Bagdad. He and his family immigrated to India. Descendants lived in India, China, England, and elsewhere.

Using the lives of the Sassoon siblings as a lens through which to view English life, particularly in its highest reaches, Stansky offers new insights into British attitudes toward power, politics, old versus new money, homosexuality, war, Jews, taste and style."--BOOK JACKET.

An interpretative history of global urbanity in the 1920s and 1930s, from the vantage point of Bombay, London, and Shanghai, that follows the life of business tycoon Victor Sassoon. In this book, historian Rosemary Wakeman brings to life the frenzied, crowded streets, markets, ports, and banks of Bombay, London, and Shanghai. In the early twentieth century, these cities were at the forefront of the sweeping changes taking the world by storm as it entered an era of globalized commerce and the unprecedented circulation of goods, people, and ideas. Wakeman explores these cities and the world they helped transform through the life of Victor Sassoon, who in 1924 gained control of his powerful family’s trading and banking empire. She tracks his movements between these three cities as he grows his family’s fortune and transforms its holdings into a global juggernaut. Using his life as its point of entry, The Worlds of Victor Sassoon paints a broad portrait not just of wealth, cosmopolitanism, and leisure but also of the discrimination, exploitation, and violence wreaked by a world increasingly driven by the demands of capital.

An impressive interdisciplinary effort by Chinese, Japanese, Middle Eastern, and Western Sinologists and Judaic Studies specialists, these books scrutinize patterns of migration, acculturation, assimilation, and economic activity of successive waves of Jewish arrivals in China from approximately A.D.1100 to 1949. While Jewish individuals and communities in China have been described in microhistorical, antiquarian, or nostalgic fashion, they have never been contrasted as a whole and in a scholarly way with other Jewish Diaspora communities.