Tell Me Your Story

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 expan