Bookshelf: The Sassoons: The Great Global Merchants and the Making of an Empire
In Shanghai, the grand Art Deco Peace Hotel on the Bund is the most recognizable legacy of a global empire that flourished here for nearly a century. Yet the Peace Hotel (originally the Cathay Hotel) and its famous bon vivant owner, Sir Victor Sassoon, were the final chapter in the story of the Sassoons, a story that begins more than a century earlier with Sir Victor’s great-grandfather, David Sassoon.
From left: The Cathay Hotel, today the Fairmont Peace Hotel; Sir Victor Sassoon (photo: National Portrait Gallery); David Sassoon (photo: Lot-Art)
David Sassoon, son of the Pasha’s chief treasurer, was born in 1792 into Baghdad aristocracy, but a change in regime put a price on his head, and in the 1830s, he fled with his young family, first to Basra (Iraq) and then to the safety of British-controlled Bombay. In India, he began building what would become an empire, fueled by the rise of the British empire and burgeoning global trade.
As a refugee, David had to rebuild his life, but as one of Baghdad’s elite, he took some advantages with him into exile: a well-respected name and a network of contacts. He also had sons, who he would later send to run the outposts of his far-flung empire. The foundation of his business, from the beginning and throughout his life, rested on building on those initial advantages coupled with a few sound principles: Information is gold, profit and quality are key, and family, charity, faith, and trust are paramount. To ensure valuable information remained only amongst the trusted (and that meant family), correspondence was conducted in the Baghdadi Jewish dialect, written in Hebrew characters—an almost secret language that few scholars could decode. But thankfully for us, Joseph Sassoon can.
The author of The Sassoons: The Great Global Merchants and the Making of an Empire is a professor at Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies and is descended from the branch of the Sassoons who remained in Baghdad. His fluency in Baghdadi Jewish dialect, Hebrew, and Arabic, allowed him to access a rich untapped vein of Sassoon correspondence at the David Sassoon Archives in Jerusalem: there were, he says, “thousands of documents dating from 1855 to 1949: everything from personal letters to account books and menus for dinner parties, seemingly every scrap of paper kept.”
The rise and fall of dynasties, especially those with colorful characters, make great copy: this is, of course, not the first book on the illustrious clan. The Sassoon Dynasty by Cecil Roth (1941), The Sassoons by Stanley Jackson (1968), and more recently, The Last Kings of Shanghai by Jonathan Kaufman (2020, Historic Shanghai Book Club selection, October 2020).
Joseph Sassoon’s new book, though, is in a class by itself because the wealth of information from the Sassoon archives reveals the inner workings of the family business: David Sassoon’s micromanaging, by letter, of the growing global business (and the sons who ran it in Bombay, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and London); minute detail on the quantities and prices of commodities; what was taken into account in making business decisions; how the Sassoons parlayed their wealth into positions at the highest echelons of power—seats on bank boards and in politics, marrying into wealth and nobility, hosting politicians, becoming part of the royal inner circle—all in order to influence the policies and politics that impacted their business, for business was always at the heart of what they did. (Until it wasn’t—but that came a little later).
Here in Shanghai, we know all about Sir Victor Sassoon—the bon vivant who hobnobbed with Hollywood celebrities, loved fancy dress parties, horse races, and glamorous women. It turns out Sir V wasn’t the only colorful character in the family: there was Reuben, close friend and unofficial bookie of the future King Edward VII; Philip, politician and art collector, son of a Sassoon and Rothschild, whose passion for art and his sumptuous mansions far outweighed his business interests, Siegfried, the World War I poet and pacifist.
From left: Reuben Sassoon, Rachel Sassoon Beer, Flora Sassoon, Philip Sassoon
Surprisingly, and delightfully, from this patriarchy also emerged two remarkable women: Flora Sassoon, who briefly ran the global company better and far more competently than her male relatives—who, unsurprisingly, engineered a coup against her. And Rachel Sassoon Beer, the “first lady of Fleet Street”, the first female editor of a national newspaper, The Observer (owned by her husband, Frederick), and the owner and editor of The Sunday Times.
In some ways, it’s a classic rise-and-fall story: when the patriarch dies, brother turns against brother, the younger generation, born in the West, who enjoy the lavish lifestyles but not the business that has created it.
Sir Victor was the face of the family’s last hurrah. A fourth generation Sassoon, he was raised in luxury in England and thoroughly enjoyed the trappings of his wealth, but unlike some of his cousins, when he inherited the chairmanship of ED Sassoon (and a baronetcy) in 1924, he went straight to work at the firm in India. Convinced that communism was on the rise in India, by 1930 he had moved to Shanghai and began investing heavily in real estate, a legacy that remains in the Shanghai landscape. Joseph Sassoon paints a familiar portrait of Victor, the shrewd businessman and bachelor-about-town who, despite his meticulously kept diaries remains a mystery, adding depth with background on Victor’s work in India.
Joseph Sassoon is an historian, and historians deal in facts – so it’s surprising to encounter factual errors in the Shanghai chapters, such as the author’s assertion that Japanese bombs fell on Shanghai on August 14, 1937 (they were Chinese nationalist planes); his contention that the Cathay contains the letters “V” and “S” on its sides (the Cathay is shaped like a “V”, Embankment House is shaped like an “S”); and misgendering the diplomat Wellington Koo (“daughter of a Chinese tycoon”).
Still, this does not take away from his achievements with The Sassoons: Joseph Sassoon has given us extraordinary insight into the workings of a global empire: how it began, how it grew, and perhaps most importantly, how and why it faded away.
In February, Joseph Sassoon spoke to the Historic Shanghai Book Club. To purchase a recording, scan the QR below or email info@historic-shanghai.com
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