Talk by David Engerman (History, Yale University)

Apostles of Development offers a history of international development through the lives and work of six South Asian economists who all studied together in Cambridge in the 1950s. They were an illiustrious group, with long careers and many succeses: winning a Nobel Prize (Amartya Sen), spending a decade as Prime Minister of India (Manmohan Singh), inventing the Human Development Index (Mahbub ul Haq), becoming a leading economist of international trade (Jagdish Bhagwati), agitating for independent Bangladesh (Rehman Sobhan), and helping create the modern Sri Lankan economy (Lal Jayawardena).

David C. Engerman, Leitner International Interdisciplinary Professor of History and Global Affairs, teaches international history at Yale University. Between receiving his Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley in 1998 and joining Yale in 2018, he was on the faculty at Brandeis University. In 2016, he served as elected president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. He is the author of four books – Modernization from the Other Shore; American Intellectuals and the Romance of Russian Development (Harvard, 2003), Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts (Oxford, 2009), The Price of Aid: The Economic Cold War in India (Harvard, 2018), and most recently Apostles of Development: Six Economists and the World They Made (Penguin/Random House-India, Oxford, 2025); he is also the editor or coeditor of multiple collections, including a volume of the new Cambridge History of America and the World.