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  • 29 Mar 2022

Discussion on the book ‘The Global Merchants: The Enterprise and Extravagance of the Sassoon Dynasty’

The seventh conversation in the ‘Vidhi Book Adda’ series featured an online discussion on the book ‘The Global Merchants: The Enterprise and Extravagance of the Sassoon Dynasty’ by Joseph Sassoon on  29th March 2022.

The Sassoons were one of the great business dynasties of the nineteenth century, as eminent  as traders as the Rothschilds were bankers. This book, drawn from vast family archives by Joseph Sassoon, 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. It explores 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. 

SPEAKERS:

  • JOSEPH SASSOON, Author of ‘The Global Merchants’, Professor at School of Foreign Service & History Department, and Director of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University
  • FAISAL DEVJI, Professor of Indian History and Director of the Asian Studies Centre, University of Oxford
  • SIMIN PATEL, Founder, Bombaywalla Historical Works

The event was moderated by Dhvani Mehta, Co-Founder and Lead, Health, at the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy.

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