An interpretative history of global urbanity in the 1920s and 1930s, from the vantage point of Bombay, London, and Shanghai, that follows the life of business tycoon Victor Sassoon.
 
In this book, historian Rosemary Wakeman brings to life the frenzied, crowded streets, markets, ports, and banks of Bombay, London, and Shanghai. In the early twentieth century, these cities were at the forefront of the sweeping changes taking the world by storm as it entered an era of globalized commerce and the unprecedented circulation of goods, people, and ideas. Wakeman explores these cities and the world they helped transform through the life of Victor Sassoon, who in 1924 gained control of his powerful family’s trading and banking empire. She tracks his movements between these three cities as he grows his family’s fortune and transforms its holdings into a global juggernaut. Using his life as its point of entry, The Worlds of Victor Sassoon paints a broad portrait not just of wealth, cosmopolitanism, and leisure but also of the discrimination, exploitation, and violence wreaked by a world increasingly driven by the demands of capital.

Rosemary Wakeman is professor of history at Fordham University. She is the author of A Modern History of European Cities: 1815 to the Present as well as The Heroic City: Paris, 1945–1958 and Practicing Utopia: An Intellectual History of the New Town Movement, the latter two also published by the University of Chicago Press

Introduction
One The Fortunes of Empire
Two Bombay, Wonder of the World
Three Bombay, Global Helm
Four London, Magnet of the World
Five London, Capital of Finance
Six Enigmatic Shanghai
Seven Global Shanghai
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index