Decline and fall

Joseph Sassoon's book chronicles the rise and fall of a Baghdadi Jewish family in British India and serves as a cautionary tale about the perils of mixing enterprise and extravagance

The Global Merchants: The Enterprise and Extravagance of the Sassoon Dynasty

Author: Joseph Sassoon

Publisher: Allen Lane

Pages: 409

Price: Rs 999

Why do business dynasties fade away? History suggests a typical trajectory from innovative hardworking founder (who may or may not be a robber baron) to dissolute and/or incompetent ancestors. The Sassoon dynasty, which has given its name to the Sassoon Docks in Colaba and other landmarks in Mumbai and Pune, diverged from this trend in only one respect. As refugees from the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century, this entrepreneurial family of Baghdadi Jews hitched their business and social wagon to the British Empire, and their fortunes mirrored its rise and decline.

This biography of a famous dynasty that made its fortunes from opium and cotton is written by a historian whose ancestors were separated from the protagonists who emigrated to British India. Many decades later, Joseph Sassoon’s own family had to flee Baghdad to escape another murderous ruler, Saddam Hussein.

Dr Sassoon is a historian who specialises in Arab studies at Georgetown University. As he tells it, he had been largely uninterested in his illustrious forebears until he received a letter from one Joseph Sassoon of Kirkcudbright, Scotland, whose father had been first cousin to the renowned war poet Siegfried Sassoon and his grandfather had married into the famous Gunzburg family of Parisian bankers of Russian origin.

This introduction and the discovery of carefully maintained family archives with other relatives stoked a mild interest in this distant branch of the family. What “really tipped the balance,” he writes, was the discovery in the National Library in Jerusalem of a trove of family documents dating from 1855 to 1949 written in the Baghdadi-Jewish dialect using Hebrew characters to prevent outsiders from reading the correspondence. Dr Sassoon is fluent in Arabic, Hebrew and the Baghdadi-Jewish dialect, making him one of the few people who could read the Sassoon papers. These archives became the foundation of globe-girdling research from England, Delhi, Mumbai, Pune and Mahabaleshwar to Shanghai and Istanbul as Dr Sassoon built this fascinating dynastic history. 

The Sassoons were not, as he points out, unique for their time in amassing huge wealth and fortune. Their distinction lay in the fact that unlike, say, their contemporaries the Rothschilds or the Vanderbilts, “they bridged east and west”. They traded with every religion and sect — trust being the key watchword — and, despite being a minority, created a home for themselves wherever they went. So their story mirrored the rise of globalisation and the economic history of the time. From the opium wars to the American Civil War, the opening of the Suez Canal and the mechanisation of the cotton industry, the Sassoon family saga is also the story of the great tectonic forces of political and economic history that shaped the pre-war world.

The Sassoon family were part of a class of thriving Jews settled for generations in Mesopotamia, serving as leaders of their community but also as money managers and lenders to powerful provincial rulers in the Ottoman Empire. Sheikh Sassoon Ben Saleh Sassoon, the progenitor of the business family, was chief treasurer of the powerful Mamluk sultans who ruled Baghdad in a semi-independent capacity. But Sheikh Sassoon soon faced the collateral damage of a power struggle between the Ottoman Sultans and their Mamluk  governors.

Joseph Sassoon traces the complex and murderous court intrigues that precipitated the flight of David Sassoon, Sheikh Sassoon’s eldest son, to the great emerging trading metropolis of Bombay. This was the time when the end of the East India Company’s trading monopoly saw the rise of the powerful trading houses such as Jardine Matheson and the Parsi merchant house of Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy, the earliest of the great opium traders to China. Opium emerged as a cash cow for the colonial government that charged traders a hefty export tax on overseas sales, reaping great profit from addicting the Chinese and fighting wars to ensure that this market remained open. This is the market that David Sassoon mastered and dominated, setting up networks of trusted shippers and trading posts (manned mainly by his sons and close Jewish associates) in key markets, lobbying the British through lavish entertainments (some might call them bribes), spending vast sums on philanthropic ventures such as schools, hospitals and libraries, and making shrewd investments in banks and shipping companies. Cotton was the other money-spinner that flourished mostly thanks to the shortage created by the outbreak of the American Civil War.

But the empire of David Sassoon, who continued to wear his traditional Arab dress to the last, split within years of his death after his two sons Abdallah and Elias fought over pretty much everything, founding rival companies. But even this may not have led to the family’s precipitate decline had it not been for the next generation’s fatal attraction for British high society. Soon, Abdallah settled in England, changing his name to Albert and acquiring a baronetcy. This Anglicisation became a family trend. Abraham Shalom, a half-brother, became Arthur, another, Faraj Hayim, Frederick, Suleiman’s wife Farha became Flora and so on. 

The consequence of this fixation with British society — the royal family was a particular obsession — was that the scions settled in England rather than Bombay, acquiring vast estates, much social cache in the society papers and increasingly leaving the business to be managed by ineffectual subordinates. They were caught wrong-footed when the anti-opium movement gained political traction and unable to compete against rising local businesses in the cotton trade. Elias’ business flourished somewhat longer than Abdallah’s until the Japanese invasion of China forced his race-horse obsessed grandson to settle in the Bahamas. By the end of World War II, the Sassoons were a footnote in history. 

Joseph Sassoon’s dispassionate and perceptive eye and flair for entertaining detail immerses the reader in the fin de siècle world of the last days of the British Empire. If there’s a cautionary tale, it may be that enterprise and extravagance are a risky combination.