A spectacular story, the making of a dynasty, one of the great untold sagas of a gilded Jewish Bagdadi family-the merchant princes of the orient, that built a vast empire through finance and trade: opium, cotton, oil, shipping, banking, that reached across three continents, and ultimately changed the destinies of nations.
For more than two centuries, from the 18th to the 20th, they were one of the richest families in the world, known as 'the Rothschilds of the East.'
Mesopotamian in origin, they descended from 12th century court families of Eurasia, and for more than forty years, were the chief treasurers to the pashas of Baghdad and Iraq.
Forced to flee the tyranny of Bagdadhi Moslems to Bushehr on the Persian Gulf, David Sassoon with his fourteen children, started over with nothing, intent on reclaiming what had once been theirs. They began to trade in cotton and opium, expanded to India, taking control of the country's opium export.
The Sassoons built textile mills and factories, developed ports, and set up branches in banking, shipping, mining, oil, in Burma, Malaya, and China; expanding beyond, to Japan, and further west, to Paris and London. Sassoons became members of British parliament, barons; were knighted; 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.
JOSEPH SASSOON is Professor of History and Politics at Georgetown University. He is also a Senior Associate Member at St. Antony's College, Oxford and a Trustee of the Bodleian Library. His previous books include the prize-winning Saddam Hussein's Ba'th Party, The Iraqi Refugees and The Anatomy of Authoritarianism in the Arab Republics.
