Through the Sassoons and Kadoories, we learn how Middleeast, India, China, and the UK were intertwined from as early as the eighteenth century.
He also served as Berlin Bureau Chief of the Boston Globe.
The Kadoorie family stayed in Asia after the Communists took over China in 1949.
Not all that these men did was detrimental.
Jonathan Kaufman tells the remarkable history of how these families ignited an economic boom and opened China to the world, but remained blind to the country's deep inequality and to the political turmoil on their doorsteps.
These are the downsides.