Description

A spectaculargenerational saga of the making and undoing of a family dynastytherivetinguntold story of the gilded Jewish BagdadiSassoons who built a vast empire throughglobal finance and tradecotton opium shipping bankingthat reached across three continents and ultimately changed the destinies of nations With full access to rare family photographs and archives

They were one of the richest families in the world for two hundred years from the19thcentury to the 20th and were known as the Rothschilds of the East

Mesopotamian in origin andfor more than forty years the chief treasurers to the pashas of Baghdad and Basra they were forced to flee to Bushiron the Persian Gulf David Sassoon and sons starting over with nothing andbeginning to trade in India in cotton and opium

The Sassoons soon were building textile mills and factoriesand setting upbranches in shipping inChina and expanding beyond to Japan and further west to Paris and London They became members of British parliament were knighted and owned and edited Britains 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

Includes a downloadable PDF of a full Sassoon family genealogical chart and photographs from the book