How To Build an Empire

“The Sassoons: The Great Global Merchants and the Making of an Empire” by Joseph Sassoon. Knopf, 432 pages.As of the end of 2021, almost 234,000 individuals in North America fall into the “ultra high net worth” category, possessing assets of $30 million or more. Part of the genius of the American system is its capacity for incubating private fortunes, which give our civil society robust and stable centers of capital, but its success is largely invisible — few of our wealthy quarter million are household names. Our celebrities tend to be drawn from entertainment and politics.“The Sassoons: The Great Global Merchants and the Making of an Empire,” the chronicle of one of the great family fortunes of the 19th and early 20th centuries, pulls back the curtain on the creation of wealth by conventional means. It discloses the behaviors that lead to both the making and unmaking of a fortune; more importantly for the politics-minded reader, it illuminates the conditions that foster dynasties.The Sassoons were a prominent family in Baghdad’s Jewish community from the 18th century, some serving as treasurers to the city’s Mamluk pashas, who, despite formal fealty to the Ottoman sultan, usually acted as independent princes. As the Mamluks entered their final showdown with the Ottomans in the early 19th century, they attacked the city’s wealthy Jews, prompting David Sassoon to flee first to Persia in 1828 and then Bombay in 1832.From Bombay, David and his sons launched a global trade empire based on little more than a Rolodex and a reputation for honest dealing. Using their trading contacts, they scrabbled their way into the trade of opium and textiles; David made unusual use of his sons, sending them at early ages to captain trade houses throughout the Far East, where they were expected to use their wits and immediate knowledge of local market conditions to turn a profit.Agility, scrupulous accounting, and a certain ruthlessness ensured a successful balance sheet; it was the Sassoons’ canniness about politics and civil society that cemented the family’s status as a dynasty. David and his successor Abdallah — who later anglicized his name to Albert and received a knighthood — leveled a mitzvah fee on each transaction in their trading houses, giving the Sassoons a fund for building schools, libraries, hospitals, and synagogues.Profit followed by charity leads to political prominence; within a generation, Sassoons were prominent associates of British officials in India, members of Parliament, and at last the Prince of Wales — soon to be crowned Edward VII. Not bad for a family that fled Baghdad with nothing, not even a command of the English language. Could it still happen?Joseph Sassoon, a professor at Georgetown University and himself a descendant of the branch of the family that remained in Baghdad, is not so sure. “What has really changed is the openness that existed in the 19th century, because of ideology, because of emphasis on trade rather than boxing everyone according to their beliefs and religion,” he tells The New York Sun. “It would be much harder. Without any capital, almost impossible, I’d say, even if you have that kind of network.”The world has changed, largely because of state regulation. “Remember, there were no passports, borders were open, you could travel with just a letter of recommendation, countries didn’t really care who you are or what you are,” Mr. Sassoon observed. “In a way, life was simpler. Even when there were antagonistic relations between the countries, it didn’t seem to affect the travel of the people in these countries.”While the age of the great empires saw much human suffering — Mr. Sassoon is clear-eyed in his presentation of how British policy toward China was steered by the great opium merchants, including the Sassoons — it also opened certain horizons, providing the freedom for persons and families to make something from nothing. A reader might ask what has been lost in our modern, fragmented, and bureaucratized world — and whether it was worth the trade.

How To Build an Empire

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