Poor Victor Sassoon is hardly remembered anymore.
“Poor” is perhaps not the best word to employ. During the 1920s and 1930s, after all, he was one of the richest men in the world, a global celebrity. Sassoon was the scion of a Baghdadi Jewish family which settled in 19th-century Bombay, making its fortunes in opium and cotton. He spent his life flitting between Bombay, London, and Shanghai. He invested in real estate and technology, throwing pounds, rupees, and dollars on champion horses and lavish parties. And he turned his family fortune into even more money – until everything came crashing down during the Japanese invasion of Shanghai and the Second World War.
Poor by his former standards, Sassoon retired to the Bahamas and married his Texan nurse.
In this episode of Past Imperfect, Rosemary Wakeman, a historian at Fordham University and author of The Worlds of Victor Sassoon, shows us why this tycoon should be better remembered. Victor Sassoon’s world bears uncanny resemblance to ours, buoyed by rapid technological change and international flows of finance. This was a world marked by intense political polarisation and a dramatic gap between a global elite and everyone else. It was, finally, a world centered on the three cities Sassoon called home: Bombay, London, and Shanghai.
Wakeman uses Sassoon’s life and fortunes as a thread to document how Bombay, London, and Shanghai defined interwar globalisation and capitalism. The three cities “resembled one another more than they represented their individual countries.” They were hubs of global finance and epicenters of the leisure industry. Their citizens experimented with fast new cars, enjoyed spanking new telephone infrastructure, and were increasingly linked by commercial aviation. Around the same time that Bombay architects began crafting the art deco sea face of Marine Drive, their peers in London and Shanghai threw up similar art deco structures as monuments to a particular form of cosmopolitan modernity.
As Wakeman explains, Bombay, London, and Shanghai were at the forefront of a broader economic transformation, one where Victor Sassoon wielded particular influence. An older, mercantile form of capitalism steadily gave way to one dominated by finance, start-ups, and real estate – the roots of the FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) economies of today.
In Bombay in the 1920s, Sassoon was quick to see that the Indian textile industry, in which his family held such a large financial stake, had a dismal future. He began selling off assets, funneling proceeds into Shanghai, where he became one of the city’s most spectacular real estate speculators. Wealth from Bombay’s mills funded the transformation of Shanghai’s riverfront Bund, where Sassoon built the luxurious Cathay Hotel and other modern skyscrapers. In London, Sassoon helped turn the family’s stodgy merchant bank into an investment banking powerhouse with branches and investments across the world.
Flush with money, Victor Sassoon joined other global elites in an awesome display of conspicuous consumption. In Bombay and Shanghai, he was a staple at the racecourses. He purchased car dealerships and nightclubs, hob-nobbed with British and Chinese political elites, and had his name and pictures splashed on the pages of interwar tabloids. Sassoon surrounded himself with beautiful women. In London, he was seen with Giulia Coletti, known for walking around town with her pet leopard on a leash.
It did not take long for noticeable cracks to appear in this world of glitz, leisure, and fast money. Bombay, London, and Shanghai were rocked by strikes and significant labour violence in the 1920s and 1930s. In all three cities, new art deco blocks were a stone’s throw away from squalid slums which birthed new forms of radical politics. Colonial authority tottered – as did British economic might. While Bombay was gripped by nationalist activity and communal riots, Shanghai struggled to fend off civil war raging in the rest of China and an onslaught of Japanese forces. The good times did not last – but even as they were ending, financiers like Sassoon were minting profits. The Sino-Japanese War actually pushed up real estate values as refugees poured into Shanghai. In the heady interwar years, even instability was mined for investment.
“Almost every time a Japanese shell exploded, it took a little nick off the Sassoon fortune.” So wrote one Chinese paper in 1938, after the Japanese military stormed into Shanghai and commandeered some of its choicest art deco monuments. Despite the ultimate loss of much of Sassoon’s investments, Wakeman notices something of much broader historical significance in his money trail.
It is this: interwar London, Bombay, and Shanghai demonstrate that the Great Depression was marked both by economic dislocation and spectacular economic growth. Rural India suffered from a credit crisis, but Bombay boomed. Great Britain’s textile manufacturing economy collapsed, but London expanded as a center of global finance and technology. China was gripped by civil war, but Shanghai witnessed a colossal real estate bubble.
In this age of extremes, global cities flourished while rural hinterlands were impoverished. Any visitor to contemporary Mumbai, London, and Shanghai can notice echoes of Victor Sassoon’s world in today’s global economy.
Dinyar Patel is an assistant professor of history at the SP Jain Institute of Management and Researchin Mumbai. His award-winning biography of Dadabhai Naoroji, Naoroji: Pioneer of Indian Nationalism, was published by Harvard University Press in May 2020.
Past Imperfect is sponsored and produced by the Centre for Wisdom and Leadership at the SP Jain Institute of Management and Research.
