HYBRID EVENT - The Global Merchants: The Enterprise and Extravagance of the Sassoon Dynasty
Abstract:
The Global Merchants: The Enterprise and Extravagance of the Sassoon Dynasty
Allen Lane (Penguin Group), 2022
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 not only about their rise, but also about their decline: why it 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.
Biography:
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. 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.
Sassoon completed his Ph.D 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.
Date:
25 February 2022, 17:00
Venue:
St Catherine's College, Manor Road OX1 3UJ
Venue Details:
Investcorp Lecture Theatre and Zoom
Speaker:
Joseph Sassoon (Director of the Centre for Contemporary Arab Studies and Professor of History and Political Economy at Georgetown University)
Organising department:
St Antony's College
Organiser:
MEC Administrator (St Anthonys College)
Part of:
Middle East Centre Friday Seminar Series
Booking required?:
Required
Booking url:
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_blbKrAujSsKkcHDHFyGNFA
Audience:
Members of the University only
Editor:
Stacey Churcher
