The Sassoons: The Global Merchants and the Making of a Dynasty

Economic History Workshop
Date
Oct 6, 2022, 12:00 pm1:00 pm
Audience
  • Princeton University faculty, staff, and students
  • Hybrid

Details

Event Description

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 (Pantheon, 2022) is about the Sassoons’ rise as well as their decline: Why each happened, how political and economic changes after the First World War adversely affected them, and finally, how realizing their aspirations to reach the upper echelons of British society led to their disengagement from business and prevented them from adapting to the new economic and political world order.

Joseph Sassoon is Professor of History and Political Economy at Georgetown's Center for Contemporary Arab Studies and 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. His research interests include political economy, economic history, Iraq, Iraqi refugees, and authoritarianism. In 2013, his book Saddam Hussein’s Ba‘th Party: Inside an Authoritarian Regime (Cambridge University Press, 2012) won the prestigious British-Kuwait Prize for the best book on the Middle East. Prof. Sassoon completed his D.Phil. at St Antony’s College, Oxford. He has published extensively on Iraq and its economy and on the Middle East. The Global Merchants is his fifth book.

Note: This is a hybrid event. Registration is only required for those who plan on attending via Zoom. We kindly ask that all in-person attendees follow the current University Covid-19 guidelines


The Economic History Workshop (EHW) is a monthly seminar series for Princeton students and faculty interested in the study of economic history. Co-sponsored by the Center for Collaborative History and the Julis-Rabinowitz Center for Public Policy & Finance, the workshop provides a forum for scholars to present their findings and receive feedback on their research in a wide array of subfields, such as financial, business, labor, legal, intellectual, technological, and social history. Open to faculty, scholars, and students of Princeton University, Rutgers University, and the Institute for Advanced Study.

Sponsors
  • The Institute for the Transregional Study of the Contemporary Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia
  • The Center for Collobarative History
  • Economic History Workshop