The Worlds of Victor Sassoon

"In this book, historian Rosemary Wakeman brings to life the frenzied, crowded streets, markets, ports, and banks of Bombay, London, and Shanghai, cities that, in the early twentieth century, were at the forefront of the sweeping changes taking the world by storm as it entered an era of globalized commerce and the unprecedented circulation of goods, people, and ideas. Wakeman explores these cities and the world they helped transform through the life of Victor Sassoon, who in 1924 gained control of his powerful family's trading and banking empire. She tracks his movements between these three cities as he grows his family's fortune and transforms its holdings into a global juggernaut. Using his life as its point of entry, this book paints a broad portrait not just of wealth, cosmopolitanism, and leisure, but also of the discrimination, exploitation, and violence wrought by a world increasingly driven by the demands of capital"--