On Aug. 15, 1947, British colonial rule in South Asia officially ended. The four independent states that eventually emerged in its place — India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh — all faced urgent economic challenges, including stark inequality and unimaginable poverty.
Six economists from the region — all of whom attended the University of Cambridge in the early 1950s — would heavily influence efforts to improve quality of life and promote economic development within the four countries. Their influence extended beyond South Asia and continued to shape international development well into the 21st century.
“The Apostles of Development: Six Economists and the World They Made” (Oxford University Press), the latest book by Yale historian David Engerman, recounts their work as leading academics and key policymakers in both national and international circles. (“Apostles” refers to the Cambridge Apostles, a prestigious student society to which the economists belonged.)
The six apostles he describes are: the late Manmohan Singh, who would go on to serve as prime minister of India from 2004 to 2014; Rehman Sobhan, an icon of the Bangladeshi independence movement; the late Lal Jayawardena, who held several prominent roles in the Sri Lankan government, including treasury secretary; the late Mahbub ul Haq, a former finance minister of Pakistan and the impresario behind the United Nations’ Human Development Reports; Jagdish Bhagwati, a prominent international economist and advocate for globalization and professor emeritus at Columbia University; and Amartya Sen, a pioneering economist and philosopher and the 1998 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics.
These six individuals, as much as anyone else, changed how economists theorized development and aid officials practiced it, contends Engerman, the Leitner International Interdisciplinary Professor of History in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and professor of global affairs the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs.
The history of development shouldn’t be centered around the World Bank… Ultimately, it’s about people from poor countries trying to strengthen their countries.
Engerman recently spoke with Yale News to discuss the work and legacy of these pioneering economists. The conversation has been edited and condensed.
All six of “apostles” you describe started at Cambridge University between 1953 and 1955. How did their experiences there influence them?
David Engerman: One of the things I point out is that five of the six — all except Rehman Sobhan — had undertaken undergraduate economic study in their home countries. Four of the five had received bachelor’s degrees. And in fact, two had even earned master’s degrees in South Asia, but then started in the undergraduate program at Cambridge. Their economic ideas were, in some sense, well-shaped before they got to Cambridge.
The university at that point was in its of high stage of Keynesianism — the macroeconomic theory that advocates for government intervention to help stabilize the economy — even though John Maynard Keynes, its namesake, had died in 1946. What they took from Keynesianism was a general sense that economics required government action, and because of that, economics is as much an applied discipline as a theoretical one.
Something else they learned was that economics is always an argument. There were fierce divisions within the economics faculty at the time. By learning from economists who had such different views, they developed particularly large sets of economic tools that they could apply to questions of development.
When they started at Cambridge, there was no such field as development economics. They learned international trade. They learned labor economics. They learned welfare economics, although less of that. They learned macro and microeconomics. It left them with a very broad idea of the kinds of economic tools that were available.
Like their professors at Cambridge, the apostles had their disagreements with each other. What is an example of when their thinking diverged?
Engerman: I’ll give you two examples. The first case concerns Rehman Sobhan and Mahbub ul Haq and the fate of Pakistan. In 1947, British India was divided into two independent states: the predominantly Muslim Pakistan and a predominantly Hindu India. The partition was very violent and displaced between 12 and 20 million people. Initially, Pakistan was formed of two provinces separated by about 1,000 miles: West Pakistan, which is present-day Pakistan, and East Pakistan, which became independent Bangladesh in 1971 following a war of liberation.
Sobhan spent the 1960s in Dhaka, the provincial capital of East Pakistan, and began working with a movement that was agitating for more economic autonomy for the province and ultimately for independence. At the time, Haq, who was from West Pakistan, was working for the Pakistan’s Planning Commission, which developed centralized economic plans for the entire country. The two disagreed vehemently and publicly about the relationship of East and West Pakistan. For example, Haq favored more investments to West Pakistan than East Pakistan because he believed it was better equipped to absorb capital flows. Sobhan saw this as damaging to the East.
The second example involves Amartya Sen and Jagdish Bhagwati, who were the most prominent academics of the six. They approached questions of development and questions of economics more generally from very different perspectives. Bhagwati is an international economist focused on the benefits of trade. Sen studies welfare economics. They had very different perspectives and disagreed about the proper economic strategy for India. Bhagwati promoted markets and trade while Sen favored self-sufficiency and targeted anti-poverty programs.
Amartya Sen was award the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1998 for his contributions to the field of welfare economics.
Several of the apostles took on major policy making roles in their home countries. Manmohan Singh served as India’s finance minister in the 1990s and, later, prime minister of India. What policies did he champion?
Engerman: Singh was fascinating. He was very soft spoken but strongly advocated for incremental economic reforms in the 1980s. He called himself a moderate and worked his way up through India’s economic and financial bureaucracy over the course of the ’70s and ’80s.
When Singh became the country’s finance minister in 1991 under Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao, he abandoned moderation in favor of what Bhagwati rightly called “reforms by storm.” There were probably more changes in economic policy in India during the summer of 1991 than had occurred any other year before or since.
The reforms were intended to liberalize the country’s economy, expanding the role of private and foreign investment. They included a devaluation of the currency, which was widely seen as overvalued at the time, deregulation, reductions in subsidies, and other efforts to shrink the role of the government in the country’s economy. Did the reforms succeed? It depends on who you ask. I think it’s fair to say that inequality increased but poverty decreased as a general outcome.
Singh’s tenure as prime minister was more complicated because he did not have a large political constituency. Some think he was selected by the party chief, Sonia Gandhi, precisely because he didn’t have that political constituency. There was a lot of what we’d call “inside the beltway” chatter about the limits of Singh’s power. He never matched the scale of reforms that he initiated by storm in 1991. Still, he accomplished several significant economic reforms.
Manmohan Singh, who served as India’s prime minister from 2004 to 2014, led efforts to liberalize the country’s economy.
What is the apostles’ legacy?
Engerman: Today, none of the four countries that emerged from British India — India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka — are among the poorest nations, according to the World Bank. They are classified as lower-middle income. They’ve all seen dramatic reductions in the percentage of their citizens who live in poverty. A half century after Henry Kissinger called Bangladesh a “basket case,” the country is doing a remarkable job economically in terms of social welfare provision. Sri Lanka has long punched well above its weight in what came to be known, thanks to Haq and Sen, as Human Development, which is the provision of basic human needs like health and education.
I wouldn’t say the work is finished in any of these countries, but they’ve all had successes. In some cases, especially in Pakistan, the most pressing issues are largely political. All these countries have their political problems, but economically, they could be doing much worse. I think the apostles can claim some credit for that success.
What are some lessons you hope your students at the Jackson School take away from the book?
Engerman: I hope they’d see that it’s important to look at development, in its past and its present, as a process that’s driven by poor countries, not rich ones. The history of development shouldn’t be centered around the World Bank, although obviously it has played a large role. It’s a story too often centered in Washington, London, or Paris. Ultimately, it’s about people from poor countries trying to strengthen their countries.
Academics like to think that our ideas emerge fully formed and then trickle down into the world around them. But I would argue that, in a lot of ways, practice precedes theory. Development economists are trying to solve specific real-world problems. And that’s where a lot of intellectual innovation originates.
Another lesson I’d hope my students glean from the book is that development usually depends on incremental change. You solve some problems, which introduces new ones, and then you rethink where you are. Grand schemes do not tend to succeed.
One thing to note is that I’m not trying to persuade them to become historians. However, I try to help them realize that historical perspectives have something important to offer them. It’s important for them to understand that what happened in the past is relevant to their work in international development today. They should consider how others view the past and how that historical perspective influences how they and others see the world. The invitation to make the case for history to non-historians has been a challenging but very enriching experience.
