Yale history professor David C Engerman: Development economics was a Global South project

Cover of Apostles of Development: Six Economists and the World They Made; and David C Engerman, Yale University's Leitner International Interdisciplinary Professor of History.

Five minutes into our conversation, Yale University Professor David C. Engerman asks the wait staff for a fresh lime soda. "Pay rent on the table," he offers by way of explanation. We are talking at a cafe in the Khan Market hotel where Engerman is staying ahead of the Delhi launch of his book 'Apostles of Development: Six Economists and The World They Made' - a look at the life and work of six South Asian economists who practised and practically formulated development economics as we know it.

The six economists of Engerman's book - Jagdish Bhagwati, Amartya Sen and Dr Manmohan Singh from India, Rehman Sobhan from Bangladesh (then East Pakistan), Mahbub ul Haq from Pakistan and Lal Jayawardena from Sri Lanka - feature in almost every list of the most important development economists in the world. And, yet, Engerman says he found there was little appreciation for how development economics has historically been "a Global South project".

That, he adds, was one of the reasons why he wrote the book: to foreground how ideas around development, poverty alleviation and addressing inequality were often coming from South Asian experts who were responding to the problems of their day and their countries - rather than flowing from the Global North to the Global South in the second half of the 20th century. Engerman offers some examples which get more detailed treatment in the book: Like, Pakistani economist Mahmud ul Haq's championing of the Basic Needs approach at the World Bank, and the Human Development Index which he started in 1990. And Amartya Sen's work in welfare economics, for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1998.

Why these six economists?

Engerman explains they form a neat(ish) cohort of economists who went to Cambridge at around the same time, who came from newly independent territories in South Asia and whose careers spanned many decades. The book includes interviews with the economists who were still around in the early-2020s when Engerman started the project. For those who were deceased, Engerman interviewed families and colleagues to get a better sense of their personal histories, personalities and the progression in their thinking.

Independence from European colonial rule, and these economists' approaches to lifting their nations out of poverty and towards prosperity are another North Star here. Right in the introduction, Engerman writes briefly about the moment India gained independence from British rule. "Many of those who crammed into the Red Fort (on the eve of August 15, 1947)," he explains, "were desperately poor, whether living in isolated villages or in densely packed cities."

From the stroke of the midnight hour, then, to borrow prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru's famous phrase, independent India had an urgent task to find and finetune a model of growth that could raise people out of abject poverty. The government of the day had to quickly figure out a way to feed their countrymen. Similar, if not worse, conditions prevailed in other South Asian countries, which too gained independence from European colonizers in the 1940s and 1950s. It was in this milieu that the six "apostles" of Engerman's book were growing up. (Apostles, as Engerman explains in the book, is a reference to the members of a prestigious Cambridge society. And while the six economists heroed in Engerman's book all went to Cambridge, only a third of them were members of the Conversazione Society whose members are still called Apostles today.)

Engerman argues that the times they lived through and the positions they held in their countries and abroad, helped these six economists shape the future of their countries as well as the subject of development economics. "I don't think we could understand India today without understanding 1991 - I'm hardly the first to say that, but I do think it's true," he says. Edited excerpt from a 40-minute conversation with Prof Engerman:

You write about what was going on in the subcontinent in the 1940s, '50s, '60s, '70s... Broadly, most of us non-economists, non-historians are aware of some of the highlights.

And the low lights.

But why did you choose to tell the story of development economics through these six economists? You've explained in the book that they all went to Cambridge, and they were all contemporaries apart from Manmohan Singh who came just a little bit later. But there's more to it?

They were basically contemporaries, yes. Technically, Dr Singh didn't overlap with the others because he started in September 1955 and they had completed in June, although a number of them met around Cambridge much later too. I came into the project with a dissatisfaction about the way international development is understood in the West, which seems to put the West at the centre of everything. It's a story that starts and, all too often, ends with USAID, with the World Bank, etc. And so I was really looking for a way to account for what a Global South history of international development would look at. And I experimented with a few different ideas, but really set on a group of people who were themselves a cohort. They all were born between 1932 and '36, so very close quarters. They all attended Cambridge between 1953 and '57, again, close quarters. Mahbub ul Haq died in 1998. But the others had careers well into the 21st century. And so it allowed me to account for a large portion of development.

Why these six is (because) these were the six who were there at Cambridge in those years. There are a couple who were at Cambridge a few years earlier, and I thought about including them, but their careers ended much earlier. They're Dharma Kumar, I.G. Patel, who's a legendary policymaker, and Gamani Correa, Sri Lankan, attended in the 1940s, but their careers ended earlier, and I wanted to be able to go as late as possible with it. So that's how I settled on these six.

Your book suggests a focus on the most important post-independence economists of South Asia. Like you said the people you picked also had long careers, some of them well into the 2000s and 2010s. Where does Cambridge feature into this, then?

There's a way in which it was a convenient selection criterion and a bit of a gambit because, as it turns out, and I show in the book that most of them did not get a tremendous amount intellectually out of Cambridge. Professor Amartya Sen said that he found Cambridge a let-down after Presidency in Kolkata.

Because the economics courses really weren't around developing economies at that time?

And they also weren't mathematical. Cambridge held out against math a decade or 15 years after most other places, including a number of Indian institutions.

So Cambridge to some sense of convenience. I do think that they were shaped by their experience there. But it's not that they came to Cambridge tabula rasa and learned everything there. In fact, five of the six studied economics at home first: (at) Presidency in Bombay, Government College in Lahore, University of Panjab in India, University of Ceylon in Sri Lanka. In this sense, they all really learned their economics both in the setting of their own country, but also formal education in the universities there. In that sense, they're all products of Cambridge, but they weren't all stamped with the same mark, as you can tell from the fact that they disagree with each other on various permutations on just about anything.

A lot of your book lays out what each person thinks on topics like self-reliance or looking towards international trade, etc. Almost like these economists are sitting around a table, having a conversation with each other. What about their thinking do you think casts a long shadow into the now? Why should we be revisiting what they did back then?

I'm a historian, so I believe that in order to understand the present you have to understand the past. I come at that with a kind of built-in desire to make those connections. The thing that really emerge from the book, more than I'd expected, is the extent to which economics is an argument. That is something they learned in Cambridge economics, and they saw it at least at close hand while they were there. Cambridge was actually kind of a bitterly divided place in the 1950s. They came in with the sensibility of really wanting to learn all the economic tools they could to make changes (in their own countries, and in the world).

In terms of their longer impacts... Mahbub ul Haq and Amartya Sen's work on human development is still around us today. The (Human Development Index) report is released every year to great fanfare. And that's one very concrete form of it. I think the turn toward economic reforms didn't come just from South Asia, but South Asia illustrates it very effectively. Not all of those efforts at reform were impositions from the Global North, from Washington. Lal Jayewardene was interested in economic reform liberalization in Sri Lanka as early as 1977. Of course, Dr Singh famously in 1991. I don't think we could understand India today without understanding 1991 - I'm hardly the first to say that, but I do think it's true.

You mentioned that development economics is seen not from the point of view of South Asia, but that the centricity still sort of lies in the Western world. Could you expand on that?

I mean not so much the development economist, but the historians who write about international development have tended to frame it as a kind of Cold War conflict. In my last book, The Price of Aid, which came out in 2018, I started looking at India as a site of Cold War conflict and then I realized that in fact the story goes the other way around. It's not that US and Soviet Union were teaching India anything, but there were disputes within India about its economic future, and different parties in those disputes engaged with the superpowers in order to win their own battles. This could happen in very concrete terms; Homi Bhabha's efforts to build civilian atomic energy. But it could also happen in more general terms: in the '60s, those like IG Patel who were in favour of less regulation and deeper engagement in the global economy... they tried to push the alignment toward the United States; others who believed that heavy industry and central planning were at the core, unsurprisingly looked to the Soviet Union for support.

I was interested in that sort of move: What does it mean to tell a history of development that's not rooted Global North outward and downward? This engages more in an intellectual framework or more concrete policy framework than the last book, which was nuts-and-bolts of what it took to build the steel plants or to build a dam or to get fighter jets, things like that. This one takes a step back because these people weren't engaged at that level. They were engaged at the level of ideas, and turning ideas into policy.

Many of these economists taught at universities first with before they went into working with their governments. A lot of them worked with government, like you say, apart from saying almost everybody sort of had a position where they were in a place to also execute some of the ideas that they had come up with. That was another question that I sort of had, because, you know, it's all fine to say that the economists thought of some ideas in terms of which way the economy should go. But at the end of the day, the people that are running the the show are the bureaucrats.

They were some of those bureaucrats. Manmohan Singh didn't start as finance minister. He entered government service in the early 1970s, lasted through the Indira Gandhi's radical '70s, lasted through the Emergency into the Janata post-Emergency government and then back in Indira Gandhi's 1980s (government), which was much more - I wouldn't say it was liberal - toward economic reform rather than pushing to the left that she had done earlier. So his engagement with Indian economic policy was 20 years or so before 1991. Others like Lal Jayawardena moved into a number of international positions over the years, as did Mahbub ul Haq. We spent the '60s working in the Planning Commission in Pakistan and then the '80s in Zia ul Haq's cabinet.

If we're to sort of go a little bit deeper into this, when they will have sort of working as bureaucrats, they were also not necessarily giving policy decisions, making those decisions. They were just executing again, what was sort of, you know, given to them as in India, of course we had the five year Planning Commission. The Planning Commission would sort of the agenda for what was going to happen, how effective, really worthy for at least for the first half of their career?

It's a good point. They didn't start out being influential. Although Mabu UL Haq joined the Planning Commission in Pakistan at the age of under the age of 30. He got his PhD at Yale and then started working for the Planning Commission. But of course, bureaucracies are hierarchical, and they didn't start at the top. I think you can see in Doctor Singh's work in the 1980s, how they were able to affect policy. In that case, it was not by making bold pronouncements, but by making small technical changes. I think Jagdish Bhagwati cleverly calls this "reforms by stealth" in the 1980s: giving the Reserve Bank of India a little more leeway to set exchange rates. It was hardly fully floating exchange rate, but they make some policy, technical changes that allowed for that. There were technical changes that allowed for more foreign direct investment. Not at a high level and certainly not like 1991, but I think but Bhagwati's distinction between reforms by stealth in the '80s and reforms by storm in 1991 is quite apt.

Tell me a little bit also about, you know, their differing policies. So if you if you were to just summarize what? Each of these stood for across their careers. I mean, I found it very interesting that a couple of them, like Soban, et cetera, for example, have a very deep sense of nationalism, also this deep sense of, you know, being Bengali and therefore sort of going towards what they thought was their right place in the world rather than what would be the most prestigious.

Yeah. Although I think for him it also was about economics. East Pakistan was mistreated; the language policy etc. But the way Sobhan engaged with the East-West Pakistan relationship, most often was about he considered East Pakistan's colonial relationship to West Pakistan that it provided more of the exports especially jute and yet all of the development money and industry was being built up in the West. So I wouldn't say it was purely cultural. He describes himself as an ideological Bengali. And I think economics was at the root of it for him.

Their views changed to some degree over time. I would say all of them took a half a step toward the Right in the 1990s. Some of them from already being over in that precinct, like Bhagwati, and others like Sobhan, who had spent decades railing on the market mechanism as inherently exploitative, coming to terms with how the market might be used to promote social justice. So his social justice North Star never changed, but he adapted to the times. They were / are active for 50 plus years. The world has changed dramatically over their professional careers, and it's not surprising that they might have changed with it.

But we're still talking about all of the things that they were talking about, which is how do you alleviate poverty? Is it equality something that you fix by doing just growth or do you sort of victim quality first?

I think the middle ground actually is where we end up. I think that's one way to characterize Dr Singh's prime ministership. A number of them, including Mahbub ul Haq with great wordsmiths. And Haq says you can't have redistribution without growth because you can't redistribute poverty. You need to have some degree of economic growth in order to do any kind of redistribution. All of them in their own way, were groping toward that, were moving toward that over their careers. And I think, you know, they disagreed with each other. Not all of them endorsed Dr Singh's policies as Prime Minister. But we see in the first decade of the 2000s some kind of convergence, I suppose, around both/and strategy. Also, I think a rejection of ideological purity. That development economics came into being to solve practical problems, to solve the problems in front of them. And so it's not a surprise that they were interested in what would actually solve poverty, not in scoring ideological points.

The way you put their different arguments in the book, it seems like they're all sitting around the table and discussing economics. Were they really meeting each other very much after Cambridge, maybe at international meets?

They were in touch with each other extensively. Unfortunately, I did not have access to any personal correspondence from any of them. But Sen really prized his relationship with Haq and prided himself on the strength of an Indo-Pakistan relationship. At various moments they were engaged with each other in international settings. Also, when Mahbub ul Haq was in the (Pakistani) cabinet, he came to visit Delhi in the 1980s. There's a picture in the book of him with Dr Singh.

There are, I think, steady interactions. Not all of them were positive. Rehman Sobhan and Mahbub Al Haq went to war over East-West Pakistan in the 1960s. In 2013, I'm sure you remember, Bhagwati and Sen both had new books and there was a sort of debate - although that might be too generous a term for it - bickering in the press of about that.

So they were engaged with each other at various times.

I see Sobhan every summer when he comes to New York. And he's always been in touch with Dr Singh, with Amartya Sen and even with Jagdish Bhagwati - even though they disagree quite sharply on visions of economics.

If you were to summarize the six economists' approaches to the idea of development, how would you describe it? Just very, very briefly, for all six of them.

It's hard to isolate their ideas from their persons and personalities. Amartya Sen was an abstractor, especially early in his career. He worked, especially after Cambridge, in welfare economics, which sounds like it would be applied but is in fact incredibly abstract. And he was determined to find a way to apply rigorous economic reasoning to development economics. Abhijit Banerjee wrote, after Professor Sen won the Nobel Prize in 1998, that he opened up a space for development economics, he opened up a way to understand economies in the Global South that was consistent with the norms of the economics profession.

Jagdish Bhagwati had always been interested in trade. His very early work is interesting; we tend to impose his later, more combative self. In the '50s and '60s, he writes he's very, very important articles in international economics that essentially are about political economy, who wins and who loses. Rather than taking as axiomatic, as most international economists did, that international trade would benefit everyone, he wanted more concrete details on, internationally and sub nationally, who benefited? Of course, by the '90s, he's promoting globalization and free trade with his usual vehemence. But I do think he is interested in this question.

Mahbub ul Haq, I think, was always trying to figure out the balance between growth and distribution and social work.

Was Mahbub ul Haq the most aggressive of the six, in terms of pushing through policy, in terms of pushing Pakistan in towards growth, and saying that's the solution to almost everything?

Well, he doesn't say that growth solves everything. But as with that line, "you can't redistribute poverty", that growth is necessary before you can do anything else.

You can find this in all of the six, in one way or another, in spite of their differences. Professor Sen in the mid-1990s reflects on '91 and says that it's great that the Congress has gotten the government out of places it shouldn't be, but he'd like to see Congress bring government into the places where it should be, meaning health and education in particular.

So while it's easy to portray them as kind of team growth (versus) team distribution, in fact, there's a lot of in-betweenness. Lal Jayawardena also I would put in-between. Sen has it right in his memoir when he says that Jayawardena wanted to be a radical but, by instinct and habit, was less of one.

Who have I left out (of the six economists and their approach to development)?

Rehman Sobhan came out of Cambridge the most politicized (of the six), and this is something very concrete that came out of his experience there. In some sense, East Pakistan was a place to fight for social justice. He knew he wanted to fight for social justice and economic justice. And when he comes into the Planning Commission in Bangladesh in the early '70s, he is full-throttle nationalization, government control and ownership of industry, etc. And he tempers that over the years. I mentioned earlier that all of them took a half step toward the Right in the 1990s, and I definitely think he did as well.

Dr Singh, I think like Bhagwati, was always interested in trade but he was also always interested in distribution. It's not visible in July 1991, but I think it's visible in the rest of his time as finance minister, and then especially as prime minister.

The book covers many decades. These six economists are also very different people who came from different backgrounds. Tell us where all your research took you, and what was the most interesting thing you found out?

Most of the time historians don't deal with living sources, but this was a project very much about that. I got rolling on the project in September 2020. It actually was a great time to talk to people. Even Professor Sen, who had, at that point anyway, a very rigorous travel schedule, even he was just sitting at home (during Covid lockdowns and travel bans around the world).

I talked to a number of their friends, their family members, their students, in one or two cases, their professors, and I really got a textured view. It doesn't all show up in there (in the book). It's not all things I can cite, but I really got a sense of who they are and how they made their way in the world every time.

Then, once travel was possible, I built on some research I'd done in India earlier. And I went to Sri Lanka, went to Dhaka, went to Delhi and then followed them. They were well-travelled - when they worked for the UN, I found materials about their work in Geneva, and in New York. Lal Jayawardena ran this development think tank in Helsinki. I found some materials about his early work at the center called Wider in Helsinki.

I worked in the UK, at Cambridge especially, and got materials. And some of it was just scattered materials where I didn't go to the archive but could scan it.

Leonard Woolf, the novelist Virginia Wolf's widower, worked as a British civil servant in Sri Lanka. His work was connected with what Lal Jayawardena's dissertation was (on). There's this correspondence between the two of them that I got from Sussex. I really love those kinds of finds.

I am an archive rat or a document person. But you asked what was most fun about it: It was actually the chance to speak with people. It was of course a great honour to be able to speak with the four who were living when I started the project and to speak with the widows of others and the family members. Even the broader panoply of people I spoke to was just great fun. I really learned a lot.

David C Engerman at the New Delhi launch of 'Apostles of Development' in June 2025.

In recent years, some of the early development models followed in these South Asian countries have come in for criticism. Some of the ideas put forward by economists and policymakers of the time are also being re-examined. How do you see this - do you think they are being judged harshly or out of context, or is it well-founded and well-argued criticism?

Well, I think they're judged very politically these days. One of the things that's common across all these countries is - it's not just in South Asia but increased political polarization. So Dr Singh is criticized from the Left vehemently for his actions. I think there's still criticism, and I wouldn't say all of it is undeserved, but each of them was trying to solve the problems that were in front of them, but those problems change over time.

One of the dynamics I try to illustrate in the book is how development economics didn't spring fully formed from the brilliant minds of its practitioners. It was smart people trying to use both the tools of economic analysis and their own dedication to making their countries a better place, to solve a problem immediately in front of them.

Well, the European economic community was taking shape, but it was nowhere near what the EU has become today.

What was his thinking there? And just as a thought experiment, if an Asian Union were to somehow emerge from the thinking of these six economists, what would it look like today?

That's an interesting question. True to my statement, they are all trying to handle the problem in front of him. He did it (the paper) for a course that the Yale economist Robert Triffin taught. Triffin did a lot of the economic theorizing that led to the creation of the European economic community or the EU. Some of it was interest in sorting out the problem the solution that was being worked out in Europe and seeing how it could work in Asia. I think the efforts towards something like that, they'd run into a number of challenges, economic nationalism being one of them. Right now, the United States is a leading practitioner, but everyone in their own way (is practising economic nationalism).

Another is - and Bhagwati has written about this - what economists would call the lack of complementarity. Trade is best when country A has things that country B wants, and country B has things that country A wants. When both countries are at the same place on value chains and export profiles, it's harder to see how an economic union would benefit.

Jayawardena and Dr Singh worked on the India-Sri Lanka Free Trade Agreement, although that, I think, is as much a political document as an economic one. It has not led to the explosion of Indo-Sri Lankan trade for the very reason that the two sides are not sufficiently complementary economically to see kind of robust trade emerge.

You've talked about India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh in the book. What about Nepal, Bhutan, Afghanistan? Were you thinking about looking for economists from those places who went to Cambridge in the 1950s and satisfied some of the other conditions to be part of this cohort, as you said?

I did look for people from those places, and I wish I had found some. There's actually a great Burmese economist named Hla  Myint - trained at the London School of Economics, and actually a kind of free marketer. And I would have loved to include him. But I had these six at Cambridge; I thought that was sufficient.

All of them present different economic profiles. Nepal's academic culture, at least in my limited experience, is more inwardly than outwardly focused. So while there's a lot of exchange between Bangladesh and India, between Sri Lanka and India, even in some ways and more at some moments than others, between India and Pakistan, Nepal wasn't fully part of those exchanges.

At Yale, we had the privilege of having Kanak Mani Dixit come visit in the winter. He is editor and founder of Himal South Asia magazine. And he has been very busy trying to promote a kind of South Asian identity as a kind of cultural and political identity as well as an economic one. But he's kind of an exception there. Kathmandu has not always sought these kinds of connections.

Have the recent developments around federal funding being pulled from American universities affected your work, your colleagues or your students yet?

It affects all of us. International students are reconsidering their plans in large ways and small.

My many colleagues... one of the great things about being at Yale is just how cosmopolitan it is. All of these institutions will become less cosmopolitan. I think we're already seeing a decline in international students. I'd be surprised if we're able to recruit international faculty as successfully.

The financial implications are still being worked out in this 'one big beautiful bill'. But if that they come to pass, I think they will have a significant financial effect.

Right now, things have sowed enough uncertainty that - as appealing as the United States is as a destination for international students the world over, with India I think as the largest sender of international students to the United States - the US will lose some luster in this. And I would completely understand that. I would have a hard time trying to convince an Indian student that they have to come here to study, even though I'm proud not just of Yale, but of the American higher education system more generally.

What question would you ask about the book if our roles were reversed right now?

There's one question that I would duck: Which is your favourite of the six or something like that.

Do you have a favourite? It's not apparent in the book...

I'm very glad to hear that. I did speak more with some than with others, but really I just relished the opportunity to get to know four of them and to get to know as much as I possibly could about Mahbub ul Haq and Lal Jayawardena, both of whom died before I started the project.

You asked about one (interesting) research find. I have a bunch of very minor research finds that I really liked. But in general, the conversations were what gave me the texture, and imagining a 22-year-old Amartya Sen at Jadavpur University or 24-25-year-old Bhagwati as a new faculty member at the Delhi School (of Economics) - that was really, for a historian, unusual to get that sort of human texture.

I did, to some degree, worry how the families and friends will take my treatment. I did my best to present as full a picture as I could. I don't dwell on cheap shots. I'm not playing a gotcha game. But my experience with them may not be the same as their friends' experience, or other people's experience.

In your prologue to the book, you write how it wasn't like a switch was flipped in 1947 and it was a clean slate. Instead, global institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank were built in a way that continued to favour erstwhile colonizers. The first time India devalued our currency in the 1960s, too, the IMF played a role...

They still do.

I mean, there's still never been a head of the World Bank who isn't an American citizen. There's never been the head of the IMF who's not a European.

With quite a few struggles. In fact, a lot of what happened in the 1970s is being questioned now...

I think much of that's a political move. Sheikh Hasina tried to burnish her own reputation by celebrating her father in every possible setting. And the role of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman became a partisan question and remains that. Over the last 20 years, it has become very partisan. All these things were named after Sheikh Mujib. When I was in Dhaka 2.5-3 years ago, I was surprised to see Sheikh Mujib's smiling face on the sides of many buildings. And that, I think, is a particular kind of a partisan nationalism that other countries have had their own experiments with as well.