24-06-2025
Reforms are both economic and political, says historian David C. Engerman
The idea of 'development' is a highly contested one, a site of intense ideological and policy debates. But as an idea, it has shaped the lives of billions in the Global South. In his new book, Apostles of Development: Six Economists and the World They Made, economic historian David C. Engerman tells the story of international development and development economics through the lives and work of six stalwart economists, all from South Asia: Amartya Sen, Jagdish Bhagwati, Manmohan Singh, Mahbub ul Haq, Lal Jayawardena, and Rehman Sobhan. Engerman spoke to the Sunday Magazine about the ideas in his book, the challenges he faced, and why he picked these six 'apostles' in particular. Edited excerpts:
What prompted this book project?
I wanted to write a global history of international development, and experimented with a couple of ways of doing it. When I found that some of the people I was interested in had attended all Cambridge, I started digging, and found there were six South Asian economists who were in Cambridge between 1953 and 1957. All of them had long, illustrious and highly varied careers, which allowed me to tell a surprising amount of the history of international development and of development economics through their lives and work.
Apostles of Development: How six South Asian economists shaped the Global South ft. David Engerman
You are trained as a historian, but your book discusses some complex economic concepts. Did you get some training in economics as well?
At Yale I received a fellowship that allowed me, for a semester, to take courses rather than teach them. I used that to take courses in development economics, although even with those under my belt, I am no development economist.
Why limit yourself to six economists from South Asia? Did you not consider some from Africa and Latin America as well, given that the book is telling a story that concerns the Global South as a whole and not just South Asia?
I did, but the problem was I could never answer why I chose that particular set of six economists. I did look at the Argentine economist Raúl Prebisch, the Saint Lucian W Arthur Lewis, and the Taiwanese economist S.C. Tsiang, but I could never get them all in the same room or the same frame. I was also surprised, as I looked into the lives and work of these six South Asian economists, how much they connected with these other economists. For instance, both Lal Jayawardena and Manmohan Singh worked with Prebisch in the course of the 1960s, and they both represented their countries in IMF and World Bank circles over many years. So I felt that, yes, it's a South Asia story, but also a global one. I look forward to the person who writes a similar book about Latin America and Africa.
How long did it take to write this book? What was most challenging and most easy about this project?
It took me six years to write it, I essentially finished it last summer. One year of that was during COVID, which had both disadvantages and advantages. For a historian, going to the archives and seeing the primary sources is the sine qua non of historical scholarship, but that was impossible for a couple of years. On the other hand, people were sitting at home and available. Even someone with as rigorous a travel schedule as Sen was sitting in Cambridge, happy to speak. So I conducted almost a 100 interviews with the four 'apostles' who were living when I started the book, with the widows of the others, with family members, students, with colleagues, with friends, with rivals, and I built this whole base of oral knowledge that became indispensable for my understanding of these folks. This was the easiest. For a historian who is used to staring at documents, to interact with people, including the very subjects I was writing about was an honour, a privilege and plain fun.
The hardest part was understanding the economics, especially the work of the two academics in the mix, Bhagwati and Sen, and to understand it enough to be able to convey it to readers equipped with even less economic expertise than I do. Here I had a lot of help from other economists and colleagues, and I hope I have represented their work for its intellectual rigour as well as contributions to how we think about and act on development.
Manmohan Singh worked in the government during the so-called 'licence permit raj' and he also led from the front during India's liberalisation. Was he a different economist in the 1970s-80s, compared to the 1990s, or did he evolve?
As a civil servant, he had to serve the interests of the ruling party and the government. He did that ably enough that when the Janata government came in after Indira Gandhi lost the elections, they kept him on -- they considered him to be sufficiently loyal and dedicated to making India a better place. So in that sense, it is hard to attribute to him all of the ideas of that period, especially early in his career, when he is quite junior. But by the 1980s, he is holding pretty substantial roles – Deputy Chair of the Planning Commission and Governor of the RBI, where he had a little bit more leeway to set a direction for the institutions. Overall he did not reverse course. He evolved perhaps. After all, he took plenty of international economics when he was at Cambridge, and his dissertation at Oxford was on building an export base for Indian goods overseas. This was at a time when the phrase 'export pessimism' was dominant.
Similar to what Bhagwati was batting for around the same time?
Yes. I wouldn't say they were lone wolves but they did not have a ton of company in the early 1960s, when they both promoted trade. Very early, as early as 1962, Bhagwati promoted devaluation.
But that devaluation didn't go down well.
That's the fault of the Americans as anyone else. Mrs. Indira Gandhi did devalue [the rupee] in 1966. Bhagwati was one among a handful of people who were consulted about it. The problem was Indira Gandhi and her staff had come to a basic understanding with the Americans that if they undertook deregulation, devaluation, and liberalisation of trade, then significant aid would come their way. But that aid never materialised. So, there are many reasons why things went wrong – there were difficult years in food harvests in the mid-1960s, and the war with Pakistan set politics and economics in India askew, but also left Americans less interested in providing assistance. So the devaluation was not a tremendous success but I don't think that can be laid at the feet of Bhagwati.
How much of the credit for India's economic reforms should go to Manmohan Singh, how much to Narasimha Rao, and how much to the World Bank and IMF?
I would leave the World Bank and the IMF mostly out of the picture. Successful reform, especially something as radical as that, is both an economic and political project, and Narasimha Rao was a master politician, managing to work with a difficult party and a divided Parliament in order to usher these policies through. He could not have done it without the economic leadership of Dr. Singh, but the opposite is also true. Dr. Singh told me that he cut a deal when Rao invited him to be Finance Minister. He told him, 'To do these reforms, I want your support. If the reforms fail, I'll fall on my sword and take the blame, and if they succeed, then you can take the credit for it.' What kind of politician wouldn't want a deal like that?
There have been powerful critiques of the limitations of the development doctrine. Of the six apostles, would you say Haq was the most radical, the most sympathetic to these critiques, given his engagement with the Third World Forum and the likes of Samir Amin.
Well, Samir Amin was not ultimately satisfied with Mahbub ul Haq's engagement with the Third World Forum. I would say that the most politically engaged was Rehman Sobhan, so much so that he is the only one of the six apostles whose name was on a hit list of his government, targeted for assassination on the basis of his work with the Awami League.
There have been powerful critiques of the development doctrine by intellectuals such as Arturo Escobar, Majid Rahnema and Gilbert Rist, to name a few. They frame development as a Western paradigm, and a form of cultural imperialism. But in your book, you argue that development was a project shaped by the Global South. How do you substantiate your argument?
Too often both the proponents and critics of development will tell you the story from Washington or from Cambridge or London, as if it was only a Cold War weapon.
By 'Cold war weapon' do you mean 'development' as a means to keep communism out of the Global South?
I mean it as a tool to win friends and influence people. The Soviets also engaged in what they called economic cooperation, including a number of projects in India. So I understand that impulse. Western archives are easier to work in. This is an accessible and commonly told story. But it's important to flip the script and see how much of development economics and international development was based on a desire to solve particular problems and those problems were problems in the majority of the Global South. People in the West weren't the only ones to be looking at them. That said, one of the confounding principles here, and the apostles illustrate this well, is that it's hard to tell North and South apart at some point. People like these six went back and forth between the North and the South.
But their training was in the North. You quote Mahbub ul Haq in your book, commenting on the difficulties of Third World intellectuals educated in the West. He thought they were 'prisoners of [their] own past training and somebody else's thought.'
Well, but the other part that Haq said, is reported by Sen. In one of their first weekends in Cambridge together in the fall of 1953, Haq says, 'I don't know why do we need to study all this economics – who cares about the price of tooth paste.' And Sen says, 'We need to know this, but we don't need to use this very much.' Cambridge provided them entry into a Western-centred economics profession, it provided them with the credentials, and it also provided them with a sense that development economics is not a single doctrine but an argument, and they had this argument, and to some degree we are still having this argument, some 80 years after they went to Cambridge.
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