The Global Merchants

The Enterprise and Extravagance of the Sassoon Dynasty

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 commercial dynasties of the nineteenth century, as eminent as traders as the Rothschilds were as bankers. In this rich and nuanced portrait of the family, Joseph Sassoon uncovers the secrets behind their phenomenal success — how a handful of Jewish refugees exiled from Ottoman Baghdad forged a mercantile juggernaut trading cotton and opium, the role of their vast network of agents, informants and politicians in extending their reach beyond their new home in India, bridging East and West.

Through the lives these ambitious figures built for themselves in Bombay, London and Shanghai, the reader is drawn into a captivating world of politics, business, society and empire — for their meteoric rise was facilitated by their ties to the British imperial project, and its waning coincided with their own.

Drawing for the first time on the Sassoon family archives, written largely in an obscure Judeo-Arabic script indecipherable to previous historians, The Global Merchants is at once an intimate history of a family across three generations and an extraordinary panorama, which reveals their place in the world-historical developments of the 150 years of their prominence — from the American Civil War to the establishment of the British Raj, the Opium Wars to the Japanese occupation of China, and the true beginning of globalization in all its dimensions.