EAN: 9780241388648

THE GLOBAL MERCHANTS - JOSEPH SASSOON GEBUNDEN

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 business
dynasties of the nineteenth century  as eminent as traders as the Rothschilds were bankers.
This book reveals the secrets behind the family's phenomenal success: how a handful of Jewish
exiles from Ottoman Baghdad forged a mercantile juggernaut from their new home in colonial
Bombay  the vast network of agents  informants and politicians they built  and the way they
came to bridge East and West  culturally as well as commercially. As one competitor remarked 
'silver and gold  silks  gums and spices  opium and cotton  wool and wheat - whatever moves
over sea or land feels the hand or bears the mark of Sassoon & Co.' Drawing for the first time
on the vast family archives  Joseph Sassoon brings vividly to life a succession of remarkable
characters. From a single generation: Flora  the first woman to steer a major global business 
Siegfried  the poet  and Victor  the tycoon who drew the stars of Hollywood's silent era to his
skyscraper in Shanghai. Through the lives these ambitious figures built for themselves in
London  Bombay and beyond  the reader is drawn into a captivating world of politics and power 
innovation and intrigue  high society and empire. The Global Merchants is thus at once an
intimate portrait of a single family and a panorama of the hundred and thirty years of their
prominence: from the Opium Wars and opening of China to the American Civil War  the
establishment of the British Raj to India's independence. Together these give a fresh
perspective on the evolution of one of the defining forces of their age and the present:
globalization. The Sassoons were variously its agents  advocates and casualties  and watching
them moving through the world  we perceive the making of our own.

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