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.
