A Book Exploring Development Economics Through the Lives of South Asia's Most Consequential Economists

The Wire

10-06-2025

Former Prime Minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh (centre) and Amartya Sen (second from left), at an event in New Delhi in December 2008. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
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Economic historians often tread paths heavily mined with complex, sometimes unsettled ideas and ideological conflicts. When they examine the subject's longue duré e since the Second World War – the slow evolution of development economics, its theories, structures, and processes – the journey can be quite treacherous.
Tracing the development of economics and growth across post-colonial nation-states, the debates, the underlying ideas and ideologies, and the personalities of the individuals who shaped them is no easy task. It can leave the historian trapped in preference bias.
David C. Engerman, the Leitner International Interdisciplinary Professor of History at Yale University, navigates many of these hazards deftly in his new book, Apostles of Development: Six Economists and the World They Made (India Viking, May 2025). The book offers a compelling description of the field of development economics and its progress over the last 75 years in South Asia.
Engerman explores the ideas, debates, and conflicts that shaped development economics through the lives of six of South Asia's most consequential economists: Amartya Sen, Manmohan Singh, Mahbub ul Haq, Jagdish Bhagwati, Rehman Sobhan, and Lal Jayawardena.
Apostles of Development: Six Economists and the World They Made, written by David C. Engerman, India Viking, May 2025. Photo: https://www.penguin.co.in/
His selection is apt. All were born in pre-independence South Asia. Their early intellectual development was rooted in the transatlantic academic ethos of the 1950s and 1960s – Cambridge, Oxford, or MIT. Yet their willingness to shift from theoretical debates – classical, neo-classical, or Keynesian – to the grounded realities of post-colonial South Asia makes them vital figures in the history of economic thought.
While exploring his choice of protagonists, Engerman writes in his introduction, 'Taken individually, each of these six made their mark on development thought over many decades – in their home countries, in South Asia writ large, across the Global South, and indeed around the world… All except Sen served in their governments at some point, each in his own way shaping the economic directions of their respective countries… Taken together, the six apostles show how much the Global South shaped the global enterprise of development.'
This examination of the lives, thoughts, and impact of Sen, Singh, Haq, Bhagwati, Sobhan, and Jayawardena is not merely biographical; it offers sharp insights into their careers as highly consequential economists.
The approach also serves as a useful narrative device, constructing a broad account of key events and debates in economics over the past 70 years, mainly centred on India and South Asia.
A book focusing primarily on South Asia
In the book's introduction, Engerman suggests that his work is about the development of economic thought in the Global South. But this claim is only partially borne out since the book focuses primarily on South Asia. It offers little discussion about the impact that experiences from other regions might have had on Engerman's six protagonists, and pays virtually no attention to the influence they may have had on development in Latin America or Africa.
Engerman does clarify that the book is centred on post-colonialism, and is therefore more about South Asia than the Global South. Still, the evolution of development economics has been shaped as much by Latin America and Africa as by the post-colonial experiences of South Asia. More could have been done to explore the wider intellectual currents that shaped the six protagonists, particularly the influence of thinkers from other regions.
During his tenure at UNCTAD from 1966 to 1969, Manmohan Singh worked closely with the Argentinian economist Raúl Prebisch, whose contributions to structuralist economics – including the Prebisch–Singer hypothesis and dependency theory – were foundational.
A much fuller exploration of Prebisch's influence on Singh's later thinking and career would have made for compelling reading. Likewise, a more detailed account of the protagonists' engagement with thinkers such as Gunnar Myrdal, W. Arthur Lewis, Walt Rostow, and Paul Rosenstein-Rodan – and the extent to which these figures shaped their ideas – would have added depth to the book.
Myrdal's work with Nicholas Kaldor on circular cumulative causation resonated with Sen's thinking. Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, too, offered instructive counterpoints, rooted in their Austrian-British and American traditions, respectively.
Nevertheless, the book draws on a rich vein of historical research, making it essential reading for those interested in South Asia's economic and development history. The six protagonists have helped shape not only the contours of development theory, but also the economic trajectories of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka.
Sen's work, which earned him the Nobel Prize, has in many ways defined a distinctive strand of development thought in economics. Bhagwati's contributions to trade theory – and his demonstration of how tariffs and government interventions can distort welfare outcomes – remain relevant in today's conflicted, Trumpian times.
Singh and Jayawardena have brought about consequential change as practitioners of the art and craft of economics, while Haq and Sobhan have done much to try and influence the economic trajectories of Pakistan and Bangladesh, respectively.
The author demonstrates a solid understanding of the foundations of international economic inequality. However, Engerman excels more as a historian than as an analyst adept at exploring the philosophical influences on economists. In retracing the paths of these six figures through the hallowed halls of Cambridge in the 1950s, Engerman introduces brief but illuminating sketches of British economists such as Joan Robinson, Nicholas Kaldor, Richard Kahn, and P. T. Bauer.
His portrayal of Robinson – her rejection of orthodox assumptions and her disdain for the mathematical modelling favoured by Americans – is particularly absorbing. His concise description of Bauer's early work in British Malaya, which laid the foundations for his dissenting critiques and the first development economics monograph, is equally compelling. These thinkers contributed significantly to the foundation of the field, as well as to the intellectual formation of Engerman's six protagonists.
Engaging depiction of Indian economic thought in the 1960s
Engerman's depiction of Indian economic thought in the 1960s, viewed through the eyes of Bhagwati, Sen, and Singh, is especially engaging and significant. His account of the period offers valuable examples of the persistent tussle between politics and economics in the Global South.
One episode in India stands out as particularly illustrative of the era's political economy. It captures both the pressures that shaped the decisions of leaders such as Indira Gandhi and the challenges economists faced in steering policy.
In 1966, Indira Gandhi made the politically fraught decision to devalue the Indian rupee – a move in which Bhagwati's influence was evident. The prime minister invited him to a confidential discussion. Engerman neatly sums up Bhagwati's dilemmas and his responses to political pressures.
'Yet as he (Bhagwati) recalled, the Prime Minister's interests were purely political, 'for which my economics training had not prepared me,'' Engerman writes, adding that Bhagwati 'soon enough proposed a range of possible efforts to adjust the effective value of the rupee, without necessarily taking the fraught step of formal devaluation.'
Engerman's portrayal of Bhagwati as a counterweight to the more structuralist thinking of Sen and K. N. Raj at the Delhi School of Economics underscores the intellectual and contextual complexities of the time. It also highlights the spirited debates that shaped the ideological divide between the two camps and, in turn, influenced the trajectory of the Indian economy.
'The Raj-Sen model's neglect of foreign trade symbolised a broader Indian tendency to omit foreign trade from policy discussions – a phenomenon that entered the Indian economic lexicon, thanks to Singh, as export pessimism,' Engerman notes.
He goes on to outline the long-term effects of India's Third Five Year Plan (1961–66), and how the divergence between the Raj-Sen model and the Bhagwati-Singh approach to trade shaped the trajectory of policy.
Engerman writes: '… this strategy also produced perennial foreign exchange shortages, and thus the pressing need for foreign aid… Much as Bhagwati had observed, the Third Plan era saw new forms of domestic market regulation, and the emergence of a dynamic in which failures of regulation led to only more layers of regulation.' He notes that the phrase 'license-permit-quota raj' first emerged during this period.
The inequality debates influenced economic policy across South Asia. Engerman's discussion of Bhagwati's reasoning – that inequality was not a lasting economic problem, as it would eventually diminish in line with the Kuznets curve – offers an illuminating perspective on why the argument failed to resonate in India, and how the debates were historically framed and perceived in the region.
Sen's work in the 1980s, in which he developed his capabilities approach and alternative formulations of development, is engagingly recounted. As Prime Minister of India, Singh pushed through the Food Security Bill in 2013, his flagship anti-poverty programme.
Engerman's account of how the Bill became 'just one skirmish in a broader battle that Bhagwati waged against Sen' – a clash over economic ideology – is compelling.
Author's skills as a descriptive historian
The author's skills as a descriptive historian are evident throughout the book. His portrayal of Sobhan's role in Bangladesh during the critical decade of the 1980s, and his contribution to the development of concepts such as South-South cooperation, raises interesting questions about the gains that might have accrued from true economic cooperation.
Engerman's description of what he terms Sen's 'often-abstruse articles' used to introduce questions of social choice and to offer a new approach to the problems of poverty and inequality – is thought-provoking, and provides one of the few genuine glimpses into the personalities of the book's main protagonists.
In the end, one might ask whether Engerman's tendency, as a historian, to focus on the minutiae of South Asia's economic development – though illuminating – distracts at times from deeper insights into the theoretical rifts of the period and the evolution of ideas within development economics, many of which remain contested.
Might it have been more fruitful to delve further into the protagonists' intellectual doubts, and the global political cross-currents that shaped them? Do the minutiae of events risk overshadowing the broader evolution of ideas? Events undoubtedly shape individuals, but for the 'apostles' of development, their uncertainties, intellectual shifts, contemporary global political contexts, and evolving frameworks of thought are just as critical.
Even with such reservations, the book's meticulous research, vivid narration, careful chronology, and focus on six influential thinkers – Amartya Sen, Manmohan Singh, Mahbub ul Haq, Jagdish Bhagwati, Rehman Sobhan, and Lal Jayawardena – make Apostles of Development a valuable addition to the literature on economics, economic history, and the development of ideas.
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