Past Imperfect Episode 18: Rosemary Wakeman on the Interwar Worlds of Bombay, London, and Shanghai

Past Imperfect Episode 18 features SPJIMR Prof. Dinyar Patel in conversation with Rosemary Wakeman, Professor of History at Fordham University and author of The Worlds of Victor Sassoon. Victor Sassoon (1881-1961) called three cities home: Bombay, London, and Shanghai. These three cities, as Rosemary Wakeman explains, best epitomized capitalism and globalization in the 1920s and 1930s. In The Worlds of Victor Sassoon, Wakeman uses the life and fortunes of the Baghdadi Jewish businessman to tell a much larger story of cosmopolitanism and global cities. Bombay, London, and Shanghai resembled one another more than their own countries: they became international hubs of finance, technology, media, and the leisure economy. This was a world of horse races and aviation, real estate speculation and the movie industry, and art deco architecture and investment banking. Victor Sassoon stood at the center of a much broader transformation of global capitalism, one which sprouted the roots of today’s economy.