James Crabtree Keynote Speaker

James Crabtree is an expert on the future of global geopolitics and globalisation with deep experience in Asia, 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, 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.

James is a distinguished visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin. He was previously Singapore-based Executive Director of the Institute of International Strategic Studies, where he organised the annual Shangri-La Dialogue, the region’s most important meeting of defence and security leaders. He was also an Associate Professor in Practice at the Lee Kuan Yew School, Asia’s leading school of public policy, teaching classes covering geopolitical, technological and economic change.

A former Mumbai Bureau Chief at the Financial Times, James has written publications from the Economist and Wired to Nikkei Asia and the New York Times, and now writes a regular column for Foreign Policy. 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.