James Crabtree Keynote Speaker

Commentator and author of best-selling "The Billionaire Raj", shortlisted for FT / McKinsey book of the year
Former Associate Professor in Practice at Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy and Mumbai Bureau Chief - FT
Executive Director of the Asia office of the International Institute of Strategic Studies

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James Crabtree's Biography

James Crabtree is a Singapore-based author and expert on the future of globalisation, able to give compelling talks on topics from the rise of China and India and the ongoing US / China trade war to the ways in which new technologies are upending politics and economics across Asia, from machine learning to digital trade. He can also provide analysis of Asian geopolitical developments.

James best-selling book The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India’s Gilded Age, was short-listed for the Financial Times & McKinsey Business Book of the Year, and named as one of Amazon’s top 100 books of 2018. He can give talks on the rise of global billionaires, what business leaders can learn from them, and the problems of corruption, cronyism and inequality that have come in their wake.

In 2021, he became the Executive Director of the Asia office of the International Institute of Strategic Studies. Previously, he was an associate professor of practice at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, and a fellow at the school’s Centre on Asia and Globalisation.

A former Mumbai Bureau Chief at the Financial Times, James has written publications from the Economist and Wired to Foreign Policy and the New York Times, and now writes a regular column for Nikkei Asian Review. Prior to journalism, James was a senior policy advisor in the UK Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit under prime ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.