Today I’m delighted to share a conversation that I recently had with James Crabtree, author of the landmark book The Billionaire Raj 🇮🇳
I’ve been passionate about Asia in general and India in particular for a very long time, and this focus is present in this podcast, alongside many other topics such as tycoons in the business world, the Netflix documentary Bad Boy Billionaires: India, in which James is featured, Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries, how the pandemic has impacted Asia, and life in Singapore, where James lives with his family.
I was introduced to James by my husband Nicolas, who met him last year in Singapore. Here’s what Nicolas wrote in an edition of his newsletter European Straits earlier this year, What’s Happening in India?
James’s book, The Billionaire Raj, is the best introduction to the current situation in India, from both an economic and a political perspective.
[A key] idea that frames James’s book is that the Indian path to development might be similar to what the US went through in the 19th century. Before America discovered the concept of the middle class and became prosperous thanks to it, the country went through a phase known as the “Gilded Age”. It was when inequalities reached a high point, a clique of oligarchs (the “Robber Barons”) basically owned the government, and any attempt at inventing a more favorable social contract for the many was quickly squashed. And yet despite that period, the US ended up unleashing a formidable growth engine that eventually benefited most Americans, not only those at the top of the social ladder.
As the title says, James’s book is focused on the Indian billionaire class; in it, he insists on the fact that since the end of the Licence Raj, India has become one of the world’s most unequal countries. Yet the current mix of political tension, cronyism, fast-pace innovation, and massive infrastructure spending (which is often related to cronyism 🤔) resembles the American Gilded Age so much that there’s a credible scenario in which India moves forward and learns to combine stability, economic security for the many, and widespread prosperity at the national level.
I hope you enjoy listening to this podcast as much as I enjoyed recording it. Please share it with someone else who you believe might like it too 🤗
For access to the full transcript, we’ll create a paid version of Building Bridges to which you’ll be able to subscribe soon. To be continued…
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Also Building Bridges is part of a network of Substack newsletters, which you may want to discover: there’s Nicolas Colin’s European Straits, there’s myLaetitia@Work, and our French newsletter, Nouveau Départ.
(Credits: Franz Liszt, Mephisto Waltz, S.514-extract from the album Miroirs by Jonas Vitaud, NoMadMusic.)
A Journey Through India's Gilded Age