On The Great Global Merchants with Joseph Sassoon
About the Book
The influential merchants of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries shaped the globalization of today. The Sassoons, a Baghdadi-Jewish trading family, built a global trading enterprise by taking advantage of major historical developments during the nineteenth century. Their story is not just one of an Arab Jewish family that settled in India, traded in China, and aspired to be British. It also presents an extraordinary vista into the world in which they lived and prospered economically, politically, and socially.
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.
About the Author
Joseph Sassoon is the director of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies and Professor of History and Political Economy at Georgetown University. He holds the Al-Sabah Chair in Politics and Political Economy of the Arab World. He is also a Senior Associate Member at St Antony’s College, Oxford. Sassoon completed his Ph.D at St Antony’s College, Oxford, and has published extensively on Iraq and its economy and on the Middle East. The Global Merchants is his fifth book.