The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India's New Gilded Age - Hardcover

Crabtree, James

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1524760064 ISBN 13: 9781524760069

Publisher: Tim Duggan Books, 2018

Synopsis

A colorful and revealing portrait of the rise of India’s new billionaire class in a radically unequal society

India is the world’s largest democracy, with more than one billion people and an economy expanding faster than China’s. But the rewards of this growth have been far from evenly shared, and the country’s top 1% now own nearly 60% of its wealth. In megacities like Mumbai, where half the population live in slums, the extraordinary riches of India’s new dynasties echo the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers of America's Gilded Age, funneling profits from huge conglomerates into lifestyles of conspicuous consumption.  

James Crabtree’s The Billionaire Raj takes readers on a personal journey to meet these reclusive billionaires, fugitive tycoons, and shadowy political power brokers. From the sky terrace of the world’s most expensive home to impoverished villages and mass political rallies, Crabtree dramatizes the battle between crony capitalists and economic reformers, revealing a tense struggle between equality and privilege playing out against a combustible backdrop of aspiration, class, and caste.

The Billionaire Raj is a vivid account of a divided society on the cusp of transformation—and a struggle that will shape not just India’s future, but the world’s.

About this title

Review

An Amazon Best Book of July 2018: India is the world’s fastest growing democracy, with an economy that is rapidly expanding, making a handful of Indians fantastically wealthy. At the same time, millions of Indians live in poverty, sometimes subsisting just feet from the fancy, almost unimaginable urban homes of the super-rich. James Crabtree uses the home of the reclusive billionaire Mukesh Ambani (that is his home on the cover) as a symbol of an Indian system that Crabtree likens—quite convincingly—to our own Gilded Age. Like in other places around the world, fair government appears to be no match against the vast sums of private capital that the “Bollygarchs” employ to cement their interests. Crabtree uses interviews and riveting reporting to give us a fascinating look into the sudden, sometimes shocking, and seemingly insurmountable rise of the Indian super-elite, as they surf the wave of globalism. –Chris Schluep, Amazon Book Review

About the Author

James Crabtree is an associate professor of practice at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. He was formerly the Mumbai bureau chief for the Financial Times.

About this edition

• Publisher: Tim Duggan Books
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1524760064
• ISBN 13: 9781524760069
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 416