The Great Global Merchants and the Making of an Empire

Rubenstein Library 249 | Carpenter Room

Joseph Sassoon is Professor of History and Political Economy at Georgetown's Center for Contemporary Arab Studies and holds the al-Sabah Chair in Politics and Political Economy of the Arab World. He is also a Senior Associate Member at St Antony's College, Oxford, where he also completed his PhD. Professor Sassoon, whose research focuses on political economy, economic history, Iraq, Iraqi refugees, and authoritarianism, has published extensively and is the author of five books.

His most recent book, The Sassoons: The Great Global Merchants and the Making of an Empire, was published in the United States by Pantheon Books (2022) and in the UK by Allen Lane under the title The Global Merchants: The Enterprise and Extravagance of the Sassoon Dynasty (2022). His prior books include Economic Policy in Iraq 1932-1950 (Routledge, 1988); The Iraqi Refugees: The New Crisis in the Middle East (London, I.B. Tauris, 2009), which offers a comprehensive study of the Iraqi refugees and the impact of their displacement on their home and host countries after the 2003 invasion; Saddam Hussein's Ba'th Party: Inside an Authoritarian Regime (Cambridge University Press, 2012), which won the prestigious British-Kuwait Prize for the best book on the Middle East; and Anatomy of Authoritarianism in the Arab Republics (New York: Cambridge University, 2016).