Geopolitical Analyst & Author

About Me

James Crabtree is a geopolitical analyst and author based in Singapore. His book “The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India’s New Gilded Age”, was named an Amazon book of the year and short-listed as FT / McKinsey business book of the year. He was previously Executive Director of the Institute of International Strategic Studies in Asia, where he led the organization of the Shangri-La Dialogue security summit, and an Associate Professor in Practice at the Lee Kuan Kew School, Asia’s leading school of public policy.

James spent ten years as a journalist and foreign correspondent, notably for the Financial Times, where he was both Mumbai Bureau Chief and Comment Editor. He is currently a columnist for Foreign Policy, and writes for publications ranging from the FT and Straits Times to The New York Times, the Guardian and Wired. He previously worked as a senior advisor in the UK Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, under Prime Ministers Gordon Brown and Tony Blair. He has worked for various think tanks in London and Washington DC, and spent a number of years living in America, initially as a Fulbright Scholar at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

James Crabtree is an author and geopolitical strategist with extensive experience living and working in Asia. He is a distinguished visiting fellow in the Asia programme of the European Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin, a fellow at the Asia Society in New York, and a columnist for Foreign Policy magazine. He is writing his second book – The Perimeter: The Struggle for Primacy in the Pacific – examining the future of America’s military presence in Asia, to be published in 2027 by W. W. Norton & Company. His first – The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India’s New Gilded Age – was short-listed as FT / McKinsey business book of the year and named an Amazon book of the year.

Previously, he was the Singapore-based Executive Director of the Institute of International Strategic Studies in Asia, where he led the organisation of the Shangri-La Dialogue security summit, and an Associate Professor in Practice at the Lee Kuan Yew School, Asia’s leading school of public policy. James also spent ten years as a journalist and foreign correspondent, notably for the Financial Times, where he was both Mumbai Bureau Chief and Comment Editor. He writes for a range of global publications from the FT and the New York Times to Foreign Affairs. Now based in London, he is also a senior advisor at both Flint Global and the London Defence Conference. Before moving to Asia he worked in the UK Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit under Prime Ministers Gordon Brown and Tony Blair. He has worked for various think tanks in London and Washington DC, and spent a number of years living in America, initially as a Fulbright Scholar at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

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