Sassoon Dock

This guide to Sassoon Dock in Mumbai opens before dawn, when Koli fisherwives who have worked this waterfront for generations set prices in the dark as trawlers unload the night's catch. It traces the dock to Albert Sassoon, whose family fled Baghdad in the 1830s, and to 1875, when he built western India's first commercial wet dock here to ship cotton and opium after the Suez Canal shortened the route. The cotton trade he planned for did not last long at this dock.