Joseph Sassoon opens the family archives to tell the story of one of the great business dynasties of the nineteenth century. The Sassoons were Jewish exiles from Ottoman Baghdad who forged a mercantile juggernaut from their new home in colonial Bombay. In the process they formed a vast network of agents, informants and politicians and came to bridge East and West, culturally as well as commercially.

The Global Merchants: The Enterprise and Extravagance of the Sassoon Dynasty, by Joseph Sassoon, is published by Allen Lane.

 Speaker: Joseph Sassoon in conversation with Professor Abigail Green, Brasenose College