Podcast: In the life and times of Victor Sassoon, an uncanny resemblance to today’s world in flux

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...

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