Joseph Sassoon will provide a public lecture on his latest work, "The Sassoons: The Great Global Merchants and the Making of an Empire."

A spectacular story, the making of a dynasty, one of the great untold sagas of a gilded Jewish Bagdadi family—the merchant princes of the orient, that built a vast empire through finance and trade: opium, cotton, oil, shipping, banking, that reached across three continents, and ultimately changed the destinies of nations.