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Event name

THE SASSOONS: The Great Global Merchants and the Making of an Empire

When

Wed 10 / 30 / 2024
10:00 AM to 12:00 PM

Where

Congregation Har Shalom
11510 Falls Road
Potomac MD 20854

Who can attend

Open to all

Price

10.00
THE SASSOONS: The Great Global Merchants and the Making of an Empire
 
hosted by the Potomac Area Neighbors Club (PANC)
 
PANC SPEAKER EVENT, with Professor Joseph Sassoon, author of "THE SASSOONS: The Great Global Merchants and the Making of an Empire"
 
10am Coffee and light breakfast;  10:30-12 Talk followed by Q&A 
 
Cost is $10.   Registration is required. Non-members are asked to contact [email protected] or send a check payable to PANC to Archana Dheer at 8566 Brickyard Road, Potomac MD 20854.
 
About the speaker: Joseph Sassoon is a Professor of History and Political Economy at the Georgetown University Center for Contemporary Arab Studies and holds the al-Sabah Chair in Politics and Political Economy of the Arab World. His PhD is from St. Antony's College, Oxford where he is a Senior Associate member.
 
Professor Sassoon's research focuses on political economy, economic history, Iraq, Iraq refugees and authoritarianism. He is the author of five books.  His ancestors were forcibly separated from the Sassoons of his book in the early 19th century.
 
About the book: 
They were one of the richest families in the world for 200 years, from the 19th century to the 20th, and were known as ‘the Rothschilds of the East.’ For more than 40 years the chief treasurers to the pashas of Baghdad and Basra, they were forced to flee to Bushir on the Persian Gulf. David Sassoon and sons started over with nothing, and began trade from India in cotton and opium.
The Sassoons were soon building textile mills and factories, setting up branches in shipping in China, and expanding to Japan, Paris and London. They became members of the British parliament; were knighted; and owned Britain’s leading newspapers, including The Sunday Times and The Observer.
In 1887, the exalted dynasty of Sassoon joined forces with the banking empire of Rothschild and were soon joined by marriage, fusing together two of the biggest Jewish commerce and banking families in the world.
Against the monumental canvas of two centuries of the Ottoman Empire and the changing face of  the Far East, across Europe and Great Britain during the time of its farthest reach, THE SASSOONS gives us a riveting generational saga of the making of this magnificent family dynasty.
 
Click https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/20/books/review/the-sassoons-joseph-sassoon.html to see the NY Times' enthusiastic review of this book.