James Crabtree

Author and journalist

James Crabtree is an author and journalist based in Singapore. He is a senior fellow at the Singapore-based Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy and a contributing editor for the Financial Times magazine. Crabtree is a former editor-in-chief of the news website Middle East Eye and a contributing editor for Prospect magazine in the UK. He's also a frequent commentator in the US and around the world on issues of global media and the current developments affecting international political economy. Crabtree's latest book - The Billionaire Raj – is a personal account of the rise of India's super-rich. He travelled to more than 30 cities across India to understand how billionaires are transforming the country. His research takes him to some of the most remote parts of India, right up to the palaces of the richest people in the world. He is also the author of the award-winning book After the Sheikhs: The Coming Collapse of the GCC Monarchies. In 2017, Crabtree was named one of the “Young Mentors” of the World Economic Forum, and he is regularly interviewed about global affairs on British and international television. Crabtree's writing has also appeared in The Guardian, The Economist, The New York Times, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, The Diplomat, and elsewhere. Crabtree was educated at the universities of Cambridge, Columbia and the London School of Economics. He has a BA from Cambridge and an MA from Columbia, both in Modern Middle East Studies. He also holds a Diploma from the LSE in International Relations.