The Sassoons were to global trade what the Rothschilds were to global finance. This marvelous narrative sprouts from untapped family archives. In the 1800s, the Sassoons managed to connect London and Bombay, Calcutta and Shanghai in improbable ways.
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The Sassoons
The Great Global Merchants and the Making of an Empire
Joseph Sassoon
They made a fortune in the cotton and opium trades, among other ventures. The rags-to-riches component of this story is less gripping, though, than the stories behind the unraveling of the family empire. We have a ringside seat here to the implosion of unrivaled wealth, provoked by back luck and poor decisions. One trip switch—among many—was the Sassoon’s alignment in China with the anticommunist Kuomintang. Their assets were nationalized after the communist takeover in 1949.
The author, Joseph Sassoon, is indeed a family descendant. Those who fear the book may be ancestral revisionism to re-calibrate the clan’s legacy can relax. This portal on world economic history is as lively, as it is critical. ■
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