The Sassoon and Kadoorie Trading Houses: Baghdad to Bombay to Shanghai

The most extensively documented chapter of modern Jewish commercial history is the Baghdadi Jewish trading network — the Sassoon and Kadoorie family commercial firms that operated across British India, Qing-era and Republican China, and ultimately London and Hong Kong, from the early 19th century through the present.

Academic scholarship on the period is substantial: Maisie Meyer's From the Rivers of Babylon to the Whangpoo: A Century of Sephardi Jewish Life in Shanghai; Chiara Betta's academic work on the Baghdadi Jewish merchant networks; Stanley Jackson's earlier popular history The Sassoons; and the broader scholarly literature on the British India, Hong Kong, and Shanghai mercantile periods.

The Sassoon firm

David Sassoon (1792–1864) was born in Baghdad to a prominent Jewish family that had served as Nasi — the leader of the Baghdadi Jewish community — for multiple generations. Forced into exile by political tensions with the Ottoman governor of Baghdad, Sassoon arrived in Bombay (Mumbai) in 1832 and established David Sassoon & Co. The firm built one of the major British-Indian trading houses of the 19th century, with operations extending from Bombay across British India, into China through the Treaty Port system after the First Opium War, and ultimately to London.

The Sassoon firm operated across textiles (particularly cotton, anchoring the Bombay textile trade), the China-India opium trade (a controversial component of 19th-century British-Asian commerce that the historical record documents extensively), the silk trade, and broader long-distance commercial operations. By the mid-19th century, the firm operated branches in Bombay, Calcutta, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and London.

David Sassoon's sons — Abdullah (later Albert), Elias, Reuben, Arthur, and others — expanded the firm and split portions of the operation. E.D. Sassoon & Co., founded by Elias Sassoon in 1867 after a split from the parent firm, became the dominant Sassoon commercial vehicle in Shanghai through the late 19th and early 20th centuries; under the leadership of Victor Sassoon (Sir Ellice Victor Sassoon, 1881–1961), the firm operated Shanghai real estate, hotel, and industrial holdings until the Communist takeover in 1949 forced the relocation of operations.

The Sassoon Bombay legacy includes substantial Bombay architectural and institutional infrastructure — the Sassoon Docks, the David Sassoon Library, the Magen David Synagogue at Byculla, and a network of community and educational institutions. The Shanghai legacy includes the Cathay Hotel (now the Peace Hotel), Sassoon House on the Bund, and a 1920s-1940s real estate portfolio that defined major segments of Shanghai's commercial geography.

The Sassoon firm dispersed substantially after 1949. Modern Sassoon family members operate across the United Kingdom, the United States, and Israel; the historic commercial firm no longer operates as a unified entity.

The Kadoorie firm

The Kadoorie family — also of Baghdadi Jewish origin — operated alongside and intermarried with the Sassoons through the 19th century. Sir Elly Kadoorie (1867–1944) built the Kadoorie commercial presence in Hong Kong and Shanghai through the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Unlike the Sassoon firm, the Kadoorie commercial structure substantially preserved continuity through the 20th-century disruptions. Sir Lawrence Kadoorie (1899–1993) and his brother Sir Horace Kadoorie (1902–1995) rebuilt the Hong Kong operations after the Second World War. The modern Kadoorie commercial structure operates today through CLP Group (China Light and Power, one of the larger electric utilities in Asia, founded with Kadoorie participation in 1901), The Hongkong and Shanghai Hotels Limited (operating the Peninsula Hotels brand, with The Peninsula Hong Kong as the flagship), Sir Elly Kadoorie & Sons Limited (the family holding entity), and the Kadoorie Charitable Foundation.

Sir Michael Kadoorie (born 1941) chairs the modern operations.

The broader network

Operating alongside the Sassoon and Kadoorie families across the 19th-century and early-20th-century Baghdadi-Indian-Chinese network were additional commercial families — the Gubbay, Ezra (anchored substantially in Calcutta), Hardoon (Silas Hardoon, the major Shanghai real estate figure of the early 20th century), Ellis, Toeg, and others. The network operated as an integrated commercial system with extensive intermarriage, joint business ventures, and shared commercial infrastructure.

The Shanghai Jewish community largely dispersed between 1949 and the early 1950s to Hong Kong, Israel, Australia, the United States, and elsewhere.

The institutional continuity

The historical Baghdadi-Indian-Shanghai network produced institutional and architectural infrastructure that survives today across multiple continents. The Bombay Sassoon institutions; the Shanghai Bund architecture; the Hong Kong CLP Group, Peninsula Hotels, and Kadoorie family operations; the Sephardic congregational infrastructure in London, Bombay, Hong Kong, and Shanghai (where the Ohel Rachel Synagogue still stands, though the active Shanghai Jewish community is small); and the substantial archival and academic literature on the period.

What it illustrates

Two structural points.

First — multi-continental commercial integration is not a recent phenomenon. The Baghdadi network operated as an integrated multi-continental commercial system across the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Second — institutional continuity through disruption. The Sassoon and Kadoorie firms survived the dispersal of their primary commercial centers (Bombay's commercial transformation, Shanghai's 1949 disruption, Hong Kong's mid-20th-century repositioning) through institutional and family-network adaptation. The dispersals reshaped the operations; the underlying institutional fabric persisted.

The Olam covers the history because it is well-documented, intrinsically significant, and structurally connected to the modern Hong Kong commercial economy.