I don't know what happened in india after the two thousand and eight crash. Was there a sort of similar or were they in a different position, they were not that affected by it? And why was that? They were not so much a part of the wornti financialization of the economy at that point. So i think this is a different pa of globilization we we are looking at here. But i also want to say that in a globilization, we pretend to think of it as something that starts in the nineteenth century, late nineteenth century. In fact, what a lot of european traders did when they arrived in asia was built on those networks
The Sassoons were one of the great commercial dynasties of the 19th century: ‘the Rothschilds of the East’. In Global Merchants the historian Joseph Sassoon charts how his ancestors – Jewish refugee exiles from Ottoman Baghdad – built a vast enterprise of trade and influence across the world. He tells Tom Sutcliffe how their meteoric rise and ultimate fall mirrored the British imperial project.
At the height of their ambition the Sassoons led an extravagant lifestyle, but never quite overcame their origins to be accepted in upper class society in the West. Money, power, class and caste are at the centre of Pankaj Mishra’s new novel, Run and Hide. The heroes of his story are lower class Indians determined to succeed – at a time when success is counted in private jets and lavish parties, and failure leads to a global financial scandal.
The Head of Economics at the Open University, Professor Susan Newman, provided expert advice for the recent BBC 2 series, The Decade the Rich Won: Stories of power and influence, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. In her studies she’s interested in the question of how wealth is accumulated today, the impact of globalisation on national decision-making, and growing inequality.
Producer: Katy Hickman