Posted by Joseph Sassoon on March 22nd, 2022

Despite being a historian, I was never much interested in the history of the Sassoon dynasty. I carry the name but am not, in the end, a member. When the founder of the family business fled Baghdad for Bombay in 1830, his siblings stayed behind. Some left later, but my ancestors stayed put until after the Six Day War of 1967, when life for Iraq’s Jews grew untenable and we too were forced to flee. As a child in Baghdad, I ignored my father whenever he attempted to educate me about my illustrious relatives in India, and only a chance encounter with another Joseph Sassoon led me to investigate further. I went to the National Library in Jerusalem, where most of the family’s archives are held. Seemingly every scrap of paper had been kept, from personal letters to account books and menus for dinner parties. This trove had been left almost entirely unexplored for a simple reason: to prevent outsiders from reading their letters, the family corresponded in a Baghdadi-Jewish dialect. It worked – the vast majority of the documents are almost indecipherable to all but a few scholars. Fortunately, however, I am fluent.

The Global Merchants is built out of the extraordinary material I found there and in other archives in London, Delhi, Dallas, Shanghai and Istanbul. The geographical spread is telling. The dynasty traded with members of seemingly every religion and sect around the globe, travelling extensively not only for business but to explore new horizons, and they felt at home wherever they settled, despite being a tiny minority in terms of both their religion and their migrant status. Six personalities successively take centre stage in the book: David, the dynasty’s founder; his sons Abdallah (later Albert), who would succeed him on his death, Elias, who developed the business in China before setting off to create a rival one, and Suleiman, who managed the business in Asia after Albert’s attention was dragged to the West; Suleiman’s wife, Farha (later Flora), who took charge after his death and was, I believe, the first woman to run a global business in the nineteenth century; and finally Victor, who built Shanghai’s first skyscraper and presided over the business in its last twenty-five years. They are joined by other Sassoons, not least the war-poet Siegfried, the politician and art collector Philip, and the first woman in Britain to be named editor at a national newspaper, Rachel Beer.

The family were not unique in their time in amassing several fortunes and rising to the upper echelons of society. But unlike their more famous contemporaries, the Rothschilds and Vanderbilts, they bridged East and West. Their story is accordingly not just that of an Arab-Jewish family who settled in India, traded in China and aspired to be British, but also a vista into the world in which they lived and prospered as well as its major developments – from the American Civil War to the opium wars, the opening of the Suez Canal and introduction of the telegraph, as well as the mechanization of textile production. The era they inhabited was driven above all by an encompassing globalization, which they and other merchant families benefited from and influenced, and which shaped our world today.