Good evening, will make a start. Welcome to Friday night's seminar here, Middle East sentence nonsense.
My name is Michael Willis, director of Middle East Centre, and we are very pleased to welcome all of you, our friends and colleagues here.
The Lecture Theatre in Oxford, and also many friends and colleagues online.
Different parents believing in seeing from all over the world. So welcome to evening is the sixth of our weekly Friday seminar series.
Those of you who have been attending throughout this tour will know that this series so far has focussed on research
and publications and books being written by members of a modern Middle Eastern studies community here at Oxford.
Now this evening, we have a lecture by someone who, although part of another university community,
we still very much like to play as a member of the academic family here at the Medical Centre.
Professor Joseph Sassoon is director of the Centre for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University in Washington, DC and states.
But much more importantly,
he's a graduate of this college maze where he completed his defender is also a longtime friend and supporter of the Middle East Centre,
where he sits on the centre's advisory board and Nancy's College, of which he is a foundation fellow.
Most of you will probably be aware Joseph took his work on modern Iraq.
Notably, his book was Saddam Hussein's Baath Party,
inside an authoritarian regime where he used the released the documents that were taken in Iraq after the invasion.
With all the details of the Baath Party and wrote a fascinating internal history of the fall of the Saddam Hussein,
he also wrote a book on the Iraqi refugees of the first decade of the 21st century and more recently,
his book Autonomy of Authoritarianism in the Arab Republics has become a mainstay of bibliographies and of course,
reading lists which seek to explain authoritarianism and region.
And it has several occasions where people I had the unusual experience of somebody saying that they
heard of the book that I wrote and then said it because it was mentioned in Joseph's testimony.
So thank you very much, Joseph, for giving me a little bit of outrage, even though so thank you, I've certainly definitely got more coverage.
Thanks to you, but thank you very much. Now, this evening, we are here to hear Jose introduce and speak about his new book,
which moves away from a more contemporary focus of his recent research and
writings to look at the remarkable history branch of his own extended family.
As Joseph will say, it's not the direct family, but the branch of his own extended family and what is entitled Global Merchants,
The Enterprise and Extravagance of the Sassoon Dynasty.
Now, if you would like a copy, we do have copies outside and you'll be most welcome to buy them after the session.
Now, I don't want to give too much away about the book before Joseph speaks to slice to say,
but it maybe is an absolutely fascinating story that's told. That's in the book.
Moreover, encountered rather appropriately in a college Porter's lodge here in Oxford, Joseph will say something about that.
It's also a story that has many connexions to the family history of all of their emeritus fellow at the Middle East Centre.
Professor Averagely, who like Joseph, also hails from Baghdad and who is also writing himself about his own family's history.
So therefore, we are delighted to have Abby join us and helped us discuss Joseph's books, which we do after Joseph is spoken.
Joseph will start speaking about the book, then we will have Avi and Joseph discussing the common themes within it,
and then we'll open it up to questions and discussion to the audience, both here in Oxford and to those of you online.
If you would like to ask a question or make a comment online, please use the Q&A function that you'll find on Zoom.
Just type in your question you can leave your name or not,
and we'll process that which you use that you can select any time you draw on that when you have time.
But you haven't come here to this debate. We had to hear about Joseph Joseph.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much, Michael, and thank you.
It is absolutely wonderful to be back here where I feel it's really on every book I've after coming out.
It has been connected to here. It did start this book somewhere else, not maybe at some time to me, but at all souls.
But there is also a culprit here sitting in the front row who has been pushing me for the last seven years.
That is Eugene Rogan to write the book.
The book has really many facets the life of al-Baghdadi, Jewish family trade and colonialism, family rifts and issues facing dynasties,
globalisation in the 19th century and what it meant for global trader anglicised zation and the desperate need
for immigrant families to be accepted in a new homeland and why some dynasties decline and others continue.
But I thought as this. What is part of the Middle East Centre?
It is only appropriate to focus on the first feature being the Baghdadi family and the connexion to their place of birth.
But I will also talk briefly about Drake and few other aspects.
There are many characters in this book, but five main figures successively take centre stage.
David Sassoon, the first the founder of the Dynasty. His eldest son Abdullah, who later on in the 1870s becomes Sir Albert, his second son, Elias,
who built the business in China and father who later changes her name to Flora, the first woman in the family, to run the global business.
And finally, Sir Victor Cecil, who presided over the business in the last twenty five years.
Other characters include Sir Philip Sassoon, Siegfried says put the famous World War One poet and,
of course, other siblings of Abdullah and L.E.S and their descendants.
The family, one of the things that really led me to, as Michael mentioned,
to move a little bit from authoritarianism to talk about this is the incredible trove of documents that I have found.
The family seems to have kept every scrap of paper in their archives stretched for more than 100 years,
and they engaged in copious correspondence, both for business and social matters.
Almost all the business correspondence, at least until 1920, was written in Baghdad Jewish to prevent outsiders from reading their letters.
Family members used their dialect, but wrote it in Hebrew characters jumping from one subject to another.
You can see there are no paragraphs. It's formal in the beginning, very respectful.
But by the third line criticism between one brother to another.
Complaining about different issues reputation of the family was of utmost importance.
Interestingly, most of the social news within the family was in English, particularly towards the end of the 19th century.
Let me just talk a little bit about Baghdad, because the family lived in Baghdad for almost two thousand five hundred years.
But the early 19th century conflict with the governor who was embezzling taxes led share assault.
al-Sadr, father of David the one, show his picture of the founder to leave Baghdad with his eldest son after a year in Bushehr in southern Iran.
He died at his family, now headed by the oldest son, David moved to Bombay.
There have been many erroneous versions of why David and his father and shift system fled Baghdad.
These versions, even repeated by members of the family research in the Ottoman archives,
clearly debunks the idea that anti-Semitism was the reason for the escaped Baghdad and its merchants suffered from all religions,
suffered at the hands of a corrupt, wily Pasha, who was known to embezzle money from these merchant families and,
if they refuse, would arrest one of the sons until he received his ransom.
Indeed, David was arrested to put pressure on his father, the Shia, who better answer.
And when David was really, like, immediately followed by his father,
all David's siblings stayed and live in Baghdad, and I am the descendant of one of those siblings.
It seems that during the year it was sheer father and son learnt about commercial opportunities
in Bombay from visiting British officials and from traders based around the Persian Gulf ports.
Bushehr itself was slowly emerging as a commercial port and a bustling centre for the East India Company in Persia,
with Indian merchants passing through and shipped through on ships flying the British flag.
All this allowed the system to learn about India in general and Bombay in particular.
When David Sassoon arrived in Bombay sometime in 1832, he began a new chapter in the history of the Sistine Chapel.
Bombay is inhabited that the time numbered no more than 200000 but were very diverse.
Hindus, Muslims, Parsis, Armenians, Portuguese and Jews.
There was a Jewish connexion with Bombay from the 16th century as one of the eminent Portuguese traders residing in Bombay was a Jew.
That there was no community until the second half of the 18th century when four different migrations came to the city.
The first of their native dual caste, known as the is right.
The second was Arab Jews from Ottoman provinces of Baghdad, Basra and Aleppo.
And the third was coaching Jews from the Malabar coast and the fourth or Persian speaking Jews from Afghanistan.
Woollahra a mess in Iraq. The migration of Arab Jews was strictly based on economic reasons to take advantage of commercial opportunities in India.
Documents show that these Jews arrived in the last couple of decades of the 18th century.
Prominent amongst them was a member of the well-known Basra family of the By.
Later, intermarried with Sassoon, by the early 1830s, there were approximately 20 to 30 families of a total Jewish population of about 2000.
And these families call themselves quote Jewish merchants of Arabia, inhabitants and residents in Bombay,
and to quote one transfer to the city in 1837 estimated the number of Baghdadi's A 350,
which represented less than one percent of the total population.
Later on, Arab Jews were referred to erroneously as the Baghdadi Jews, irrelevant of where they came from as long as they were from Moslem country.
While David did not have any experience in trading,
he benefited from two intangible assets extensive contact in the first year as a result of the family's involvement for many years in collecting
taxes for the ultimate support in the province of Baghdad and their good reputation amongst the merchant families in the Ottoman Empire and Iran.
Yet in spite of all these preparation, it must have been daunting to take this young family and siblings across the Arabian Sea
to a foreign city where no family member resided and far away from home in Baghdad.
Family was of immense importance to David Sassoon.
His first wife died at a young age in Baghdad after burying him two sons and two daughters.
His second wife, who outlived, later gave birth to six sons and four daughters.
Those are survivor. So in essence, you have a little army of 14 children who were spread around the globe.
Their sons were trained in business from their youth and were later sent to
different locations such as Baghdad and the Gulf Port to meet other traders,
gain experience and learn Arabic. Once in Bombay,
David realised the fate and success of the family had to be tied to the British Empire and the firm of David Sassoon and
Sons began a long connexion serving British colonial economic and political interests wherever they had branched out.
Although the founder, David Cecil, neither set foot in Britain nor spoke English.
David Sassoon was granted British citizenship in recognition of his service.
He was fluent in Arabic, Hebrew, Persian and Turkish and learnt to study but never learnt English.
Twenty years after his arrival in Bombay, he swore the oath of allegiance to the British,
and he still had not learnt enough English to sign his own name.
It was signed in Hebrew.
Growing up in the Ottoman Empire, he never understood why his oath of allegiance was not only to a sovereign but to the East India Company,
which control India at the time. Despite his identification with the British and loyalty to the Empire,
even when he began to attend ceremonies where British officials noted his generosity, he invariably replied in his native our.
It is really important to underline that Arabic was very important for the first and second generation of the Sunni.
His son, Abdullah, who inherited David, was not different in this regard, in spite of his keen interest in all things British.
Arabic remained his primary language, and he insisted that his family and employees learnt well.
In one letter, he mandated that all clerks in one day be able to write in error.
In another surprise and irritation at the inability of any of the clerks in Hong Kong to write the language properly.
This is by 1890. David was, by nature, risk averse and studied every possible difficult.
In 1843 44, he said his second son is to explore the possibility of expanding into China after spending time in Canton, Hong Kong and Shanghai.
And he is reported back on the tremendous opportunities in this enormous new country.
This coincided with the end of the first Opium War 1839 1842 and the opening of Shanghai to foreigners in the early 1850s,
and he settled in Shanghai and began reporting daily to his father in Bombay.
The year 1858 was an important turning point in the destiny of the show's descendants.
Two major events occurred the legalisation of opium in China and the dissolution of the British East India conflict.
The latter followed the empress had done and expected Indian rebellion against the British 1857,
after which the British government took direct control of India opening free trade to Indians and foreigners.
This allowed families such as the sisters to capitalise on the vast commercial opportunities in the spread of the family was so why?
This is a map of where they really spread around.
You could see there is major city port. The three in red are the major hub.
The first hop was Bombay, then the second hub was Shanghai, and the third one was in London.
I think it is really important to deliberate the relationship between the family and British imperialism,
as this needs to be seen in the context of a new immigrant family who landed in
a foreign country that was governed by the most powerful country in the world.
The British Empire and the East India conflict, which ruled India, as I mentioned, until the end of the 1850s.
This issues were not only immigrant family, but there were also a part of the truly small minority.
And interestingly enough, other minorities were not racist migrants to Bombay, such as the Nazis, also identified with British colonialism.
Let me turn and talk a little bit about the business.
Two commodities changed Bombay financially and led to the rise of a new global merchant cartel and opium,
though David Cicilline was not involved in those commodities. Initially, he monitor closely the trading scene involved.
His name is not mentioned in the archives or local newspapers throughout the 1830s and most of the 1840s.
David Caecilians, right to be amongst the top businessmen of Bombay was the slow and gradual.
There was not a one event or trade that changed the picture rather.
But he kept developing a network of local and foreign traders and trustworthy counterparts and learning not only where the opportunities lie,
but also out of trade and negotiations.
He would spend days, for example, by the cotton exchange talking to traders agents and scrutinise the international news.
Careful. David was convinced to enter the cotton market by witnessing the surge in demand for Indian
carpet after the panic caused by the failure of American golf in late eighteen fifties.
Powerful trade circles such as the Manchester Chamber of Commerce had recognised
India could displace America as the most important source for this wide goal.
But until 1850s, high transportation costs made Indian cotton less attractive.
Outbreak of the American Civil War and consequent collapse of American exports of cotton provoked skyrocketing prices and a frenzy of
speculation as when Beck rolled cotton shipment changed hands many times between spectrum before delivery to factories with each exchange,
a small profit could be made.
The value of carton more than quadruple in the first two years of the war, pushing Indian peasants to increase their production.
There was even woolmer's that people were tearing apart their mattresses and selling the car.
Before long, however, there were signs that the market was losing steam and too many traders had too much stock.
The explosive growth of cotton in India had been matched in other countries, such as Egypt and Brazil.
And global oversupply was a major concern. By 1865,
reports began to circulate that cotton traders were experiencing big losses and that the
steep fall in prices was creating havoc as traders did their utmost to unload their stock.
A year later, reports carried details of a Bombay devastated financially, with estimates of almost 80 percent of traders filing bankruptcy,
as one brother admitted to another brother that he could not sleep for worry and opined
that every member of the family had to be vigilant in order to avoid large losses,
since that would damage the most important element in their business, their reputation, which was sacrosanct.
The violence went in,
causing the crisis illustrates how global merchants conducted their business in the mid-19th century without a vast communications system.
The Telegraph was becoming available. It was very expensive and not confidential.
The business was set up, so each major hub had its own house and each house made independent decisions.
The relationship of trust amongst the branches allowed these family members to prosper, but it also led to constant recrimination and friction.
Information was accordingly at the core of the most merchant's activities, exacerbating the scarcity of reliable information.
Were they employees or agents working for the merchant but selling the information to a competitor?
And here really where this decision had that advantage with their own language because all their documents were unreadable to anyone else.
Also, because of this emphasis on the information, David was the first merchant in India, the time to send their son to London.
This really proved to be critical as the son had more information about the ongoing of the American Civil War than those in India,
which gave the family an advantage.
Volatile times needed nerves of steel and experience, what is really remarkable was the young the sent to all the corners of Asia to run the business.
For example, India's when he was sent the first time to Shanghai, he was about 16 and a half.
17 year old son running Hong Kong in 1864 was 24, while the one in Shanghai, Sulaiman, was only 23 years old.
I tried to tell this to my students that there is no doubt that British imperialism and colonial interests for China to purchase opium.
This is just probably began trading in the 1840s after India arrived in China.
And initially there were very small players in comparison to some Indian traders or British firms such as Jardine Matheson,
but only slowly later the sessions became a significant part of the trade.
While opium had been used for thousands of years in India and China, both for medical and recreational use,
the British victory in the Opium War opened the door to the export of large quantities of Indian opium to China.
This became an intern, an integral part of a triangle trade.
British people had become addicted to tea and developed a taste for Chinese,
so that had nothing to export to China and enrich our opium filled the gap for decades and made up 16 percent of its total revenue.
It also became the world's most valuable traded commodities in 1816 and remained so for a quarter of a century.
In the words of one Indian scholar, Bombay became a great commercial and industrial centre thanks to the opium business.
Another star argued that quote without the drug, there probably would have to no British Empire and a foot.
Maybe that's a little bit exaggeration. This story of opium is woven throughout more than 60 years in the life of the
Sassoon Dynasty and their role in the opium business in India and China is in it.
It's of oblique tied to the family's success.
By the 1850s, opium had become an integral part of the family's trading business, particularly after its legalisation in eighteen fifty eight.
The Sons, as you can see in the map, branched out to Singapore, Rangoon, Nagasaki, the other port cities.
And according to the Jardine Matheson Archives, this issue was adopted to cut the opium prices,
providing loans to producers in India, making bulk sales at low rates,
combined with advances to Chinese dealers and probably most effective,
advancing as much as three quarters of the cost to Indian dealers willing to consign shipments on a regular basis.
And this strategy proved to be. Traders were there off of here,
more caution prefer to deal with this spills because of their willingness to pay up to 50 percent of the value of the merchandise.
Furthermore, the family worked hard to maintain its relationship with its partners.
The opium trade began to weaken by the 1890s due to international and regional factors.
Opium is a case study of how interrelated some politics were during global expansion, I guess still today consistent from the beginning.
The sisters mustered all their connexions and political clout with the British government to ensure favourable opium trade terms.
It was intertwined with the British ideology of free trade and its colonial policy.
This issue's build strong relations with British politicians and senior officials to aid them in keeping up the trade.
Faced by political agitation, by both the House of Commons and House of Lords,
the British government did what governments do best when tough decisions need to be made.
It form a commission of enquiry to study the subject in detail, thereby delay the need for immediate action.
The commission collected incredible amount of data gather witness responses from a large array of individuals.
Narration, the finished report is seven volumes, a total of 2500 pages,
and it is one of the most prised sources on opium in all its features during the 19th century.
But the commission reached the following conclusion.
As a result of a searching enquiry and upon a deliberate review of the copious evidence submitted to us,
we feel bound to express our conviction that the movement in England in favour of active interference on the part of the Imperial Parliament for
the suppression of the opium habit in India has receded from an exaggerated impression as to the nature and extent of the evil to be controlled.
The gloomy descriptions presented to British audiences of extensive wardrobe
and physical degradation by Rokia have not been accepted by the witnesses.
Representing the people of India, nor by those most responsible for this government of the country.
This was truly an incredible conclusion.
Effectively, after six years, the commission report removes the opium question from the British public agenda for another 50 years.
The view of the Indian government prevailed for financial reasons and for the empty opium lobby.
This was a severe blow after it felt it had garnered support politically and public.
Though the battle was lost in 1895, the war was not over on both sides.
And this saga continues after World War One.
In spite of the stigma attached to the trade and the growing opposition in the second half of the 19th century,
this is one that other traders continue to defend the trade and attempt to put a halt to restrictions imposed by China.
That has shown a sort of Bombay's trade came from opium even before the Sisulu's arrived,
and the families simply viewed it as a viable trading business imitating successful local and foreign traders.
This assumes our guys are also totally void of any self-criticism or doubt about the effects of opium.
Apart from opium and cotton, the other main commodities that they traded were still indigo, rice and pearls.
They were never in the money lending business, but they invested in different banks in India, Persia, Hong Kong, Shanghai and the UK.
Overall, the family was fortunate to have other major factors working in its favour.
Global commodity prices began to warm the second part of the 19th century as
industrialisation and economic growth were taking place in the major economies of the world.
But British ideology emphasised free trade, guided the government's policies worldwide and facilitated the operation of global trading.
And lastly, the development of transport within and outside India, particularly the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869.
This commercial success continued,
in spite of the risks and splits within the family that followed the death of the founder, David, so that's in the book.
I'm not going to talk about it. I just want to make a very few general remarks.
One is the connexion to Hollywood, and Baghdad was almost there amongst the first and second generations of this system, even in the 1850s.
They were still referring to Bombay as Benedict in Delhi, one of the English for religious questions or issues.
They turn to Baghdad and its rivals, and even in later decades,
when the system intermingled with the English aristocracy and married outside the Baghdad Jewish circle, there were reminders always of their rules.
This is their crest. And around 1888, a double up by then, Sir Albert wanted to imitate the European families.
So as you can see the top of the crust, there is the Hebrew words and that they will not.
And then the Latin at the bottom can be a constant with candour and consistency at
first being used actually by the Earl of Coventry a century and a half earlier.
David probably would have approved of the primacy of trust and reputation and perhaps also the palm tree,
which the press carried as their reminder of their Baghdadi roots,
but also the fact that date palms were crazy both in the Bible and the Koran, and became symbols of beauty and plenty.
The coat of arms was later added to many of the family's buildings in Bombay and London, and also to the grave of the founder.
What is really intriguing, Daryn? Hundred and thirty years old, Aadhaar archives,
there was not once a question whether the family should deal or not deal with someone because of religion, sect or nationality.
One question was always in the archives was OK, can we trust this trader?
And this, to me, was the real true globalisation of open borders and where they dealt with every sect and religion and part one last part.
Philanthropy and actually, they initiated a very, very innovative method.
They charge a philanthropy tax on every trade they get, whether that trade was profitable or not.
You look at their accounting ledger, you see, you know, the cost of the purchase, the maritime tax,
the insurance tax and then the philanthropy of zero point two five quarter of one percent at the end of the year.
Of course, there were hundreds of trades, a lot of money accumulated to be given,
and there a policy was to give only in the places where they were or were.
So local communities benefited.
But also, as did the poor and young in cities such as Bombay.
One last word about the decline I'm not going to go to detail,
but suffice to say that I believe that one of the main reason was their loss of their Arab Jewish identity.
Anglicised Asian and the desperate need to be fully accepted by the English
aristocracy led them to drift away from their traditions and from their businesses.
Even though you're in their fancy estates, more interested in parties,
horse racing and hunting than dealing with the dramatic changes that were taking place around the globe.
Thank you. Thank you very much indeed, Joseph, for a fascinating lecture.
There is so much in the book, but of course you could only cover some of the main things,
and I'm very glad you did mention the client at the end, just because is one of the most fascinating parts of the story about how things rise,
but also happens for the relatively quick Shutter Island like to invite ambition
to join Jose to have a discussion about some of the themes in the book.
As I mentioned earlier, there are many overlapping themes between Abbey's family history and Josephus, both hailing from Baghdad.
Perhaps I would. You like to find just a few comments on having read the book and the sort of things the residents to achieve in summary.
Thank you, Michael. Very glad we're like to start with a few comments.
Having read the book from cover to cover and having heard just this past week when you were seekers and
having read some of the reviews of his book and I would like to say is how impressed I was with this book.
It's so deeply research, it's so elegantly written and it's beautifully produced, which makes it a real, real pleasure to read.
And Joseph writes with, Well, I knew that he was trained in this college as an economic historian,
so I had no doubt that he would deal really well with the context, with the backdrop, with globalisation.
But I was really impressed by the sensitivity and skill with which he tells the story of this remarkable dynasty and the story of the people,
the individuals, the business, as well as the role that they played in Iraq, in Britain, in India and in China.
There are many merits to this book, and I could go on for a long time,
but I would like to single out one factor that makes this book unique in this Joseph linguistic skills.
As a friend of St. Anthony's and a fellow of the Middle East Centre,
I have always valued the importance of languages in writing about history and the social sciences.
For 25 years, I was an active member of the Department of Politics and International Relations,
where it was possible to write the DPhil thesis on a country without knowing the language that's bad enough.
But in America, it's even worse, much worse,
because some American Department of Political Science supply the Sydney verb root Sydney verb was a distinguished social scientist,
and the verbal said that no Ph.D. student,
no graduate student should be allowed to write a Ph.D. on a country unless he or she had flown at least twice, apparently now to turn to the book.
I have quite a lot of questions. One question is you're a member of the dynasty.
You modestly describe yourself as a descendant of a modest branch of the dynasty, which stayed behind in Baghdad.
How does your own connexion with the dynasty? How did it affect you if it did in any way?
I actually never had any emotional attachment to that, and I really approached it as a historian from the beginning.
As I mentioned, the only and only reason that I was willing to engage with it is really when I found these archives,
which had not been used by actually anyone who reads the book,
will realise I'm very harsh on the family and in many instances,
sometimes maybe even comes across that I didn't like one or two personalities, but it it it really did not affect me.
I didn't feel emotionally at times that if I read more about, you know.
Negative aspect that is going to be reflecting, I did not think about it that way.
OK. There is something specific to this biography, and that is the piece, it's a collective biography of a dynasty of a family.
In this respect, it's unlike a traditional biography which is of one person.
I myself have written the biography of King Hussein of Jordan,
and I found it quite easy to write a biography rather than writing a more general book because you had a clear focus.
There was one person, and it was easy to decide what to include and what not to include in the account.
If the person that you are writing about was involved or was affected, then you would write about the episode about that,
and otherwise you would leave the account with writing about the collective biography.
You must have been a lot more complex and more difficult. Yes, I agree.
Not only that, but you know, one of those main characters was kind of omitted by the other people.
So there are two books on the show, and one was published in the 1930s and one was published by a journalist in the 1960s.
These two books and one book in Hebrew basically talk about Farha.
Three Lions only get six pages to her husband.
Well, when you start going through the archives and you see the incredible amount of correspondence,
and I you know that I really was one of the things that came across here is actually is the first global C woman that run a global business in 1895.
It was really unheard of. There are a lot of other matriarchs, but not a running a day to day business in a global order.
And that was really total. I mean, I tried to do it.
You know, there is a huge amount about Victor Sassoon, and he left incredible amounts.
So his diaries still exist from the 1920s until literally the day before he dies in the early 1960s.
And he has cut every press that talks about him.
You know, it really depends. Of course, we don't have a lot about the founder.
It comes across and they didn't start this intensive correspondence until the 1850s when all the sun spread around,
because in the beginning, they were all working from one single office in Bombay, so they didn't really have correspondence.
So it was a problem. It was not easy allocating as much material to each one of them.
I talked about the importance of languages, but I forgot to say why I made this clear.
The reason was because they wanted to point out that most of the correspondence of the family was conducted in Arabic, and so it's Hebrew script.
But the language the content is Judeo Arabic, which is the Baghdadi dialect.
Arabic, yes, but written in Hebrew letters.
And it's hard enough knowing Arabic and Hebrew, and Joseph is fluent in Arabic and in Hebrew and can read Arabic.
So he's uniquely qualified to have been able to do the research that went into this book.
And the result is very, very rich material that no one else could have accessed, except you.
So sorry, I forgot to say that I don't want to pick up on something that you emphasised in the talk,
and that is that the students were not expelled from Baghdad.
They were not the victims of persecution or anti-Semitism emphasise this because one of the reviews says that there was a
pogrom against the Jews and there wasn't a programme that in fact Iraq was the model of harmonious Muslim Jewish relations.
My family enjoyed or benefited from the strong tradition of religious tolerance and good relations between Muslims, Christians and Jews in Iraq.
The Jews were one of many minorities, unlike Europe, where the Jews were.
And there was a Jewish problem. There wasn't a Jewish problem in Iraq.
So what would you like to say a bit more against this notion? Well, the persecution in the talk, I mean, there is no such a thing.
And I think the one, you know, there are two erroneous versions, one that they left because of cholera,
which there was cholera, but they didn't leave the cause of cholera.
And if you're leaving the conflict fleeing a country because of cholera, you don't take only one son and leave another three there.
The second is the fact again, it was really targeted because of this conflict with the Wali, who was very corrupt.
And before the wali, the father was the subgraph bashi or the tax collector on behalf of the Sultan in Baghdad,
which is that was basically the finance minister in the province.
So it was a very prominent. But when a corrupt wali came in, he needed to start to raise money for his own little army and,
you know, adventures, which at the end afterwards, the sultan pushed him out.
Are many biographies of Ashkenazi Jews and European and North American Jews.
There are many autobiographies, but there are very few autobiographies of the founder of the Jews.
And in this respect, your book was an eye-opener about the world of Sephardi Jews.
There is a view of the dominant view of Jewish history that the lachrymose version of Jewish history,
which is Jewish history, which consists of a never ending chain of discrimination,
persecution, violence culminating in the Holocaust, and this version of history probably fits the history of the Jews in Europe.
But it most certainly doesn't fit the history of the Jews in the Arab lands.
Were you conscious of contribute to something which is relatively rare, which is about Iraqi troops?
Well, I really didn't know because as I said, even the sons talked about feeling it because of, you know, anti-Jewish feelings in Baghdad.
And it's only when I, you know, working through the Ottoman archives that it became clear and the correspondence,
because at some point it was a report to the whole time that this is what happened.
And, you know, two years later, actually the governor was deposed off of his place.
I mean, I think it is very interesting and I talk about it in the aspect of anglicised nations in many ways.
Also, the Baghdadi Jews, especially like the Sicilians,
were better accepted in England than the Rothschilds, which is really interesting because for two reasons.
One, I think that the Rothschilds were looked upon as nouveau riche, you know, the new wealth, and they should not be part of the aristocracy.
And to all the prejudices of being in the banking and lending business, the systems were.
Exactly the opposite, they were not in the money lending business,
but also they were treated from the before as an aristocracy that they were aristocrats in the sense in Baghdad.
I talked about it the other day and I mention, I think it's interesting.
Usually you read stories of rags to riches. It's actually riches to rags, riches and then decline.
It's almost four waves. Each one is very different.
So there are really a lot of differences. Well, on the British Connexion, this is a really important dimension of the story.
The British Connexion is relevant to the rise of the dynasty, the success of the dynasty and finally through the fall of the dynasty.
So it's there all along in your book. And I would like I don't dwell on why the British Connexion was so important for the rise of this dynasty
and to suggest that it is because the British in the Empire preferred minorities to the mainstream.
Yeah. A number of reasons. One was education in Iraq, there was a very good Jewish educational system in Israel at Universal.
My mother went to the school for girls.
Everything was told through the medium of French and she came out everything that very good French, English, Arabic and Hebrew.
So the Jews in Iraq knew languages,
but also they were a minority and therefore less likely to be swayed by the currents of Arab nationalism and more dependent.
So would you agree that this is part of the explanation of why this?
Came about a hundred years before all Arabs. I mean, there were parts of the Ottoman Empire, and so that has to be taken in context.
I think that definitely the identification also from their point of view, they arrived into, as I said, into a foreign land, into a foreign city.
And so the immediate thing is to identify with the most powerful country in the world.
And their interests were aligned. I mean, as I met, talked about it, there is the free trade policy, which was more an ideology rather than a policy.
This expansion of global trade, everything kind of fitted with their interests.
There was definitely an alignment, but also the feeling of, you know, the family identified with the most powerful power that existed.
I think with the decline, it almost went to the extreme of desperately wanting to be part.
And once they became part of the aristocracy, after all, they gained many titles.
Some of them, you know, like Philip Sassoon, became undersecretary for the Air Force.
He was the secretary of Lloyd George and then others.
Another son from another brother became an MP.
So you have these different things.
And of course, intermarrying with the Rothschilds and Ginsberg and all these dynasties, they now entered a different world.
I mean, if you take it to the extreme of the fourth generation,
the generation of Siegfried Sassoon and Philip Sassoon, one person like Siegfried Sassoon never knew who was Jewish.
And definitely, he didn't know that his father was born in India from a Baghdadi origin.
Philip Sassoon didn't want to be identified, and when you went to visit as undersecretary for the Air Force Giraffe in 1920,
he met with King Faisal, but didn't bother to meet with any one of the family that was there on and on.
There was, by the 1930s, all kind of signals that on the coat of arms that I showed,
they started erasing the Hebrew words because they wanted just the Latin.
They started saying, when people ask them, they are originally from Toledo in Spain because Spain sounded nicer than Baghdad.
Right? So I think it's really the first generation the Baghdadi Jewish context was so fundamental and critical to them.
It was the exact opposite by the fourth generation. In the afterword, you reflect on the causes of the decline in the state, and just now,
I need you to dwell on the fact that the most brilliant and emulated the upper
classes and became a bit like them instead of being industrious and disciplined.
They let the dissolute life of Asia. They became the FT.
Another factor that you deal with is poor tax planning.
If they all have, they had fabulous wealth and they all had wills.
But some of these wills wounds were good and weren't very tax efficient.
They were very generous. So in some of the wills, the list of beneficiaries was about four pages,
which reminded me that in our community, where there is a wiggle there a lot of relatives.
Yeah, I mean, there are really a number of factors.
I actually also say that at the end of the day, taxation was not the main reason for their decline,
but it definitely I think there was something fundamental that it's the planning at the beginning with trust didn't take place.
Unlike, let's say, the rot job and each generation when the father died.
And if you have six children and no one is working.
Well, and as first, you're paying 50 percent and death duties, and then the other 50 percent is split amongst six or seven children.
And since none of that was working, one can afford to buy these beautiful houses that they acquired in London and the estates.
And it's really it's the absolute kind, you know,
almost model of how wealth get dissipated each generation as a start spreading and becomes
smaller and smaller units and each unit then in one more generation gets against it.
And so us nothing. I mean, at some point they have these and I have in the book descriptions of some of the
fancy houses that they had in London and in the country and even in Scotland.
But none of them was left because each generation had to get rid of them, to sell, one,
to pay for the taxes and to split it amongst a number of children or sometimes siblings.
And that is not a good, a good way to maintain wealth. The students were also known as the Rothschilds of the East.
And you compare them to another rich dynasty, the Canaries.
And you have a passing comment to the Lehman Brothers in America.
So this opens up the much bigger question, why the question and you don't have to answer.
But was there anything in the Jewish makeup that explains the success of these penises?
I don't know about that. I mean, I think it's a matter of I argue in the book, it's not only about, you know, being astute and a good trader,
you have to be lucky to be in the right place at the right time and being in India the right time.
It was all kind of factors that work to their, you know, the American Civil War comes in.
As I explained and called on prices, quadruple opium becomes a legal commodity.
The Suez Canal is opened and suddenly trade routes are cheaper and faster on and on.
I mean, you have to know how to take advantage of it.
And that's, you know what happened? They did. Thank you, Joseph, thank you.
Time for a few questions from the audience here in Oxford and hopefully online to open up to the audience with Pfizer.
Thank you very much. Obviously, we still trust this wonderful book because I saw and the two generations of my family,
Bob have grown up hearing about interacting with some docs and hospitals library system in the state, which still bear their names that used to exist.
So it's a very real living presence in that city. But apart from that,
I had a couple of questions with so my first question has to do with your account of what the
students brought with them from Baghdad that allowed them to assume their initial prominence.
And you suggested that this was the reputation and the contacts they had through the Ottoman Empire and in the Persian Empire as well.
So when they moved to India and then further eastwards, which in non ottoman lands without those contacts,
do they continue that model of, if you will, networks and connexions that allow them to repeat their success?
Or is there something new that happens? And do they become part of another kind of, if you will, economic logic?
And the second question has to do with the reasons for the decline that you mentioned.
And I take your point,
but it also strikes me as equally important that these sort of family based firms tend not to survive more than a few generations.
That's true of the big Indian Parsi Hindu-Muslim firms as well.
And I've always been surprised by the fact that unlike in England or in America,
they tend not to end up as joint stock companies and of the kind the East India Company was Lisa Cummins, arguably the first joint stock company.
So there you have the model of modern capitalism.
But interestingly, it is not taken up by vernacular capitalists, vernacular merchants until very recently and in India,
even today, it's still family firms that last two or three or four generations,
the Tatas are the only ones practically who have actually moved in the direction of corporate direction in that sense, which is not family control.
So it's one that plays a role and attached to this question is one about loss of inheritance.
So we know that with Indian mercantile families, including very big ones.
It's the nature of the the law, as it was known or community specific law that determined the success or failure of the families concerned.
So with Sharia, with the splitting up of the inheritance every generation, that was a major problem.
And, you know, Muslim traders had to figure out how to circumvent it with the Hindu law.
There's a joint family and how to deal with that.
Was there something along these lines or what this assumes entirely eventually sort of removed from any kind of Jewish law when they say,
moved to England? Thank you for these questions.
Yes, the answer to the first question about her reputation conduct is absolutely and categorically yes.
Even when they were dealing with totally new people and the archives has a lot,
so I didn't realise, you know, in Carlton there was a lot of forgeries.
Basically, people add water agents to the courtroom,
so it spread when it arrives to the final destination and a few times the orders came back from a dollar.
You know, forget it. Pay them back. Everything that they paid.
It's not their fault because our reputation and we want to have this contract intact.
And that really,
really stayed until kind towards the end when when they stopped in this trading business in one of the things is they never made those contacts,
you know, so that's why the incredible amount of trust become so critical.
It's very interesting because by the 1860s 70s, a lot of the British firms, even before that, insisted on contract.
This assumes never wanted to sign contracts because they really said it's our reputation and your reputation.
That, to me, also was the most incredible thing is how in that world, without internet and without telegraph and without communication,
people still knew, you know, who has a good reputation in Zanzibar and who does not have a reputation.
And it just continued throughout that time.
Question is much more complicated about the different generations.
I think there are families that kept it going.
The rules of inheritance, whether in India or Britain, was always the law of the land and not the religious law, unlike in Islamic countries.
And I agree with you that in Islam, the inheritance that to really dissipation of wealth of creator results wealth.
At some point in the 20th century, they began on a new trick which didn't work,
but ended up being in court, and there is very interesting material on that of the court.
They tried to claim that their residency was in India because they kept houses in India because I think
at some point the death duties in the UK was about 60 percent in Britain and fifty five percent even.
There was complaints in some of the things that £300000,
which was a huge amount to the National Trust and was furious that even on that, you wasn't getting any exemption on that donation.
I think it is harder to keep it after four or five generations.
I mean, the Tatas are really exceptional. But there are more and more, maybe not in the huge wealth of, you know,
the Rothschilds or the daughters, but there are quite a number who have managed to do it for Judah.
It's a tough question, and it's really tough how to take it from one generation to another and keep it.
Well, the question usually I'd like to pick up on one of the points that I've used to making in the course of doing the research for your book.
You had some fantastic encounters. You got to meet some very, very interesting people are pursuing this story.
And the one that struck me, Joseph, was when you went to Hong Kong to get access to the Canterbury archives.
And so I'd like to bring the question back to the diaries, which are mentioned because there are still players.
What has a sense of their position in Hong Kong suggest that families that they came after the system designed to stand, but they're still there.
And so as one talks about the decline of the family like disappearance,
are there lessons to be learnt from those that have managed to adapt and survive and thrive?
Is there something about the experience, the casualties that you could bring into your analysis to?
Yeah. I mean, their experience is fascinating, but not only that they came after and the founder worked at the Sicilians until he left.
But more than that, when the last character he saw Sir Victor Sassoon in Shanghai, he left when World War Two broke out.
And he also wasn't getting along with the Japanese, who invaded Shanghai in 1937,
stayed behind and pretended he was going to be one of those peace mediator between the Japanese and the British.
There is a lot about this in the book, but the most critical aspect he left before people were interned in Hong Kong and in Shanghai.
The Canaries were interned for four years in a camp, first in Shanghai and then in Hong Kong, and lost everything.
But in 1945, they started everything from scratch.
And of course, they lost their assets in 49. You know, and in Shanghai.
But the difference is is Victor Sassoon sold all the agencies against the advice of his right hand man and wanted to go to the Bahamas.
And of course, you know, I don't need to tell anyone what happened to Hong Kong.
If you had real estate and businesses and contacts in 1946 to roll it 50 years later,
and that was a huge I think really what differentiates is the personalities and the inner person was interested in the family and the
business and determined to create in one another who was a playboy who wanted just to run away and become an international figure.
And when that didn't happen, he moved on to settle in the Bahamas and do horse racing, which he won the derby four times.
But as I argue, he bet on the wrong horse at the time.
Thank you, Joseph. Sadly, we've come to the end of our time for our session paper, but I thank you very much.
I to not spit on your audience online. Finally, we invite you to join us next week where we will have a panel on the crisis in Syria.
But I'd like you to please join me in thanking Abby for joining us, particularly for Joseph,
such a wonderful lecture and been able to talk about his new book, which I encourage you.
All of you have helped you on tax. Thank you very much.