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.
