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Bea Conti
Bea Conti, C'19, a double major in History and English, received a summer grant from the Jeffrey A. Evans Fund to support archival research in Jerusalem and England to research the Sassoon family and their role within British imperialism and the opium trade.
ISRAEL

The Sassoon family were prominent Baghdadi Jewish merchants during the nineteenth century who, in 1830, moved from Iraq to Bombay, India to escape persecution. There, they created a commodities empire selling anything from Opium to Cotton, working closely with the British Empire as they worked in port cities around the world. The family went from essential outsiders to insiders in just a few decades, eventually gaining peerage in England and marrying into the Rothschild family.
ENGLAND

However, one of her favorite "archives" was visiting the Cutty Sark in Greenwich, England. The Cutty Sark is a famous tea clipper built on the Thames in 1869, and it is the same style of ship that would have been used by the Sassoons while shipping their goods between China, India, and England. Ms. Conti walked on the ship, viewed the storage area, and saw how tea and other goods went from East to West during the nineteenth century.