David C Engerman, a historian at Yale University, is the author of the book titled Apostles of Development, which explores how six South Asian economists — Amartya Sen, Manmohan Singh, Rehman Sobhan, Mahbub ul Haq, Lal Jayawardena, and Jagdish Bhagwati—who studied at the University of Cambridge and profoundly shaped development thinking in the Global South. In a recent interview with Bonik Barta, Professor Engerman discussed the themes and insights of his book. The interview was conducted by Badrul Alam.

What first inspired you to write about the Apostles of Development? Was there a moment, a document, or a personal story that made you realize that these six economists belong together in one narrative?

I started the project because I was interested in writing a history of international development. I had just finished writing a book on the economic aid to India during the Cold War. So South Asia was very much on my mind. And I was also interested in trying a biographical approach to it. And I experimented with a few different scenarios.

A colleague of mine, Professor Rohit Dey, suggested that many of the people and ideas I was interested in came together at Cambridge in the mid-1950s. Then, after a little bit more research, I found six economists who all received their undergraduate economics degrees between 1955 and 1957. And that became the basis of it, as it allowed me to build on what I knew of India, while also learning more, and to answer a question I found very frustrating and difficult to answer in other contexts: “Why this group of people?” And the answer is, well, this is a group of people all born between 1932 and 1936, all of whom studied at Cambridge between 1953 and 1957. And that’s what gave birth to the book as it actually appeared.

The word development is often used to mean economic growth or poverty reduction. In your book, you seem to treat it as something deeper — almost an idea or belief system. How do you define development in your own research, and what do you think people usually get wrong about it?

I’m quite capacious in my definition. I believe that various fields of economics contribute to the questions of economic development. I would say it’s a kind of purposive activity, often through the state, especially in its early years, designed for economic transformation. So that includes GDP growth, but not just GDP growth. And I think the fascinating thing with this group of six apostles is that they all contribute differently to this. There was no field of development economics when they started their studies at Cambridge. And so they took courses in a wide range of tools, including international economics and welfare economics. And so they never defined the term narrowly, nor do I.

You chose to focus on individual economists rather than institutions or policies. What did this human-centered approach reveal to you—their ambitions, doubts, or even moral struggles that traditional histories of economics might miss?

I began with the understanding that international development and development economics are very practical fields. They exist not only within universities and academic departments but also at places like the World Bank, the UN Development Programme, and—perhaps most importantly—in planning commissions, development agencies, and finance ministries across the Global South.

To capture that breadth without attempting an exhaustive institutional history, I chose to follow six economists through their long careers. That approach allowed me to explore the intersections of intellectual life, academic work, and institutional change. Writing it as a series of individual journeys, rather than as institutional histories, made the book both more accessible and more readable.

Was it difficult to delve deeply into the lives of individuals?

As with every project I’ve undertaken, the key challenge was deciding what to include and what to leave out. In this book, I focused primarily on the professional lives of the economists rather than writing full biographies. I talked about their personal lives only when those experiences directly influenced their professional paths—no more than that.

In that sense, it posed the same kind of challenge as any other project: knowing where to draw the boundaries, when to stop, when to do more research, and how to put things together.

Much of development history is told from the perspective of Western donors or global institutions. Your book highlights how economists from the Global South have shaped those debates. Why is it important to revisit that side of the story now? And what do we gain by viewing development as a two-way intellectual exchange rather than a one-way transfer?

What we gain is a fuller understanding of what development actually means — what people are doing, and what they believe they’re doing, in both theorizing and practicing it. I don’t think there’s a single truth we need to uncover, but rather a broader, more inclusive vision of development itself.

It’s also the right way to tell the story. The history of development can’t be written without acknowledging the contributions of these six economists and many others from the Global South, who navigated both international and Western institutions while bringing their own perspectives to the field.

Writing a book that covers so many countries, languages, and archives must have been challenging, as you mentioned. What were the biggest difficulties you faced, either in finding sources or in connecting the lives of these very different economists into this story?

I was disappointed that I couldn’t use any of the Apostles’ personal archives. A number of people were forthcoming with unpublished work and other scattered materials, but there was no systematic archive for any one of the six. Part of the reason may be that they were so peripatetic — traveling all over the world — so their papers never consolidated. It’s also possible that some people simply weren’t ready to share what they had.

On language, the project is essentially in English. I relied on one or two items in Russian, but the bulk of the material is in English. That reflects the fact that these economists lived their professional lives in English: they trained at English-medium universities in South Asia, did graduate work in the U.K., and worked in predominantly English institutions. I would have liked to use sources in Bangla, Urdu, Hindi, Sinhala, or Marathi, but that would have produced a very different book. I did have help from a brilliant Bangladeshi undergraduate at Yale who worked on some Bengali materials and translations. By and large, though, the book is grounded in English-language sources.

Even though your book focuses on the mid-20th century, the debates it explores — on inequality, sustainability, and global finance — continue today. Which lessons from those early economists still resonate in the present, or perhaps warn us against repeating old mistakes?

One advantage of this particular group of economists is that five of them had careers that extended well into the late 20th and early 21st centuries. So the book spends a good bit of time in the 1980s, 1990s, and beyond.

Aside from reorienting our view of international development as a global south project, one key lesson I’d emphasize is that practice precedes theory. Economists and intellectuals often imagine that ideas emerge fully formed from individual reflection and then spread into the world. But development economics, as a field, has always been driven by the effort to solve particular problems in particular places at particular times.

That’s why the book pays close attention to context—both global and national—showing what problems these people were trying to solve. And that remains true today: the field continues to evolve through direct engagement with real-world challenges and the efforts to solve them.

In Apostles of Development, Rehman Sobhan is not just a historical figure but central to your larger intellectual argument. How did his story fit into the book—as a challenge to a regional case study, or as a reflection on the politics of knowledge itself?

I’d say it was more of an opportunity than a challenge. His career offered a way to engage with several issues I consider crucial — chief among them, regional inequality. Beyond the familiar divide between rich and poor, which Professor Sobhan has long addressed, there was also the question of regional inequality between East and West Pakistan. He played a central role in defining that problem, proposing solutions, and later advocating first for autonomy and ultimately for independence.

A second opportunity came from his work with the Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD), which allowed me to examine the rise of NGOs, which was an especially significant phenomenon of the 1990s.

According to Rehman Sobhan, right after independence, there was a strong desire to build an egalitarian society. Based on your research, how do you relate to that statement?

I think that reflects a dilemma Professor Sobhan was keenly aware of, as were many of his contemporaries. It’s the question of whether the goal of development should be to reduce poverty or to reduce inequality. Poverty can, in theory, be reduced in a non-zero-sum way, without changing the underlying distribution of wealth or power. But Sobhan was always more committed to addressing inequality itself, not just poverty.

That, of course, introduces a tough political economy challenge. Pushing for equality is far more difficult than simply aiming for poverty reduction. And then there’s the question of growth—how essential it is, and when it should come. Sobhan’s classmate and occasional adversary, Mahbub ul Haq, once said that without growth, all we can do is “redistribute poverty.”

In your book, two figures were debating in Cambridge about Bangladesh and Pakistan, (then East and West Pakistan). Did you find any particularly interesting incidents from those debates?

Yes. Professor Sobhan was at a workshop with Mahbub ul Haq in 1972 in Rochester, New York. You can trace the debate there as well. Haq, who favored a unified Pakistan, regarded the secession of Bangladesh as a catastrophe. While he expressed sympathy for Pakistanis, he saw the breakup as a real disaster for the entire region.

What was fascinating was watching him play both roles: as an active participant in the debate and as a commentator offering analysis on East Pakistan’s future. Professor Sobhan, by contrast, remained consistent in advocating for more autonomy, which ultimately escalated toward independence. He also played a diplomatic role during the liberation war, acting as a kind of “counter-ambassador,” persuading the World Bank, the U.S., and European governments to curtail aid to Pakistan under the circumstances.

Rehman Sobhan’s journey from a Cambridge student to a leading voice of economic justice in Bangladesh is remarkable. Which aspects of his Cambridge experience most shaped that transformation—from a student of economics to a thinker of national independence?

In his memoirs, Professor Sobhan describes how he became politicized at Cambridge. Before then, he hadn’t been politically active. Interestingly, this happened less in the classroom and more through the political environment of debating societies.

He became an avid reader of magazines like the New Statesman and Nation. When he later founded Forum magazine in the late 1960s, he modeled it directly on those publications — a left-leaning, intellectual platform. In that sense, Cambridge profoundly shaped his political outlook. It also helped him articulate a vision of South Asia as a unified region, rather than merely a collection of separate countries. I think both the political engagement and the regional perspective were formative experiences he carried forward from Cambridge.

Can you share your perspective on the current context of Bangladesh and Professor Sobhan’s contribution to the country?

It’s worth noting an important form of participation. That is, Professor Muhammad Yunus was a student of Professor Sobhan at the University of Dhaka.

Over the past decade, Professor Sobhan has taken a challenging position: he supports the Awami League while simultaneously holding it accountable to the principles he associated with its founding. In recent years, I would say the party has fallen short of that vision compared with how Rehman Sobhan saw the Awami League in the 1960s and 1970s, when he was most active.

Of the six eminent economists in your book, who drew you most, and whose philosophy resonates closest with you?

Personally, my heart is with Professor Sobhan, although I have not been an activist in the way he has. But the value of the book comes from considering all six together—their disagreements, debates, and diverse approaches.

One lesson the apostles learned at Cambridge is that economics is an argument, not a single fixed position. Each of them is interesting in their own right, with moments of achievement and setbacks. Together, they present a unified vision, but not a singular vision: a global south perspective on development. It’s not one singular view, but a broader debate. And beyond South Asia, that conversation would be even wider.

How do you see their philosophy or theories as relevant to the current context of the global South?

One argument I make in the book is that practice precedes theory. This suggests the need for incremental change and pragmatism over rigid ideology. Achievements generally come incrementally. There’s this idiom: one should not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. We improve situations where we can, knowing that future generations will need to revisit and revise solutions, because addressing one problem inevitably creates new challenges.

Stepping back from the book, as a historian of global ideas, how do you see your role? Can writing history shape how policymakers and citizens imagine economic futures, or is your primary goal to help us understand the past?

Professionally, my inclination is on the latter: understanding the past. One historical lesson that feels especially relevant today is to recover the 1940s and 1950s in South Asia—a period when people genuinely believed they could change the world and play a meaningful part in solving their countries’ biggest challenges. It wasn’t overconfidence; it was a commitment to engagement and action. I like to see that sort of determination and engagement. The lesson, I think, is to be engaged.

What can the new generation learn from your book to help build the nation?

Perhaps not a satisfying answer, but real change begins with engagement and youth activism, like what we saw in Bangladesh last year or in Nepal this summer. That kind of involvement sparks change, but it’s only the beginning.

Professor Sobhan helped bring about Bangladesh’s independence, then spent the following two to three years planning its economic future. For nearly 50 years since then, he continued to push, prod, and guide Bangladesh in the right direction. It’s a lifetime of engagement that has had a number of successes. As he notes in his memoirs, that journey had both a number of challenges and failures as well.

Are there any points or messages from your book you want to highlight?

I’d emphasize two key ideas: the global South as an active project, and the principle that practice precedes theory. While I’m writing a history book to understand the past, the book also makes the case for engagement and persistence. Revolution isn’t achieved in a day; a revolution only begins in a day, week, or month.

All of the six apostles, in their own ways, persisted. They confronted intellectual, political, and economic challenges and worked to see them through to solutions.

As a historian, what is your view on the future of Bangladesh?

The advantage of being a historian is that we don’t have to predict the future. What I read makes me a little worried, but I also think there are possibilities. Things have long seemed unsettled, and that hasn’t changed. Yet there are small breakthroughs, and revolutions are often a series of small breakthroughs.

At the start of his memoir, Professor Sobhan quotes Wordsworth: “Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive/But to be young was very heaven.” A few lines later, he refers to a world as “plastic as we would hope”—by which he meant not cheap or disposable, but valuable and shaped by human hands. I think Bangladesh is still in that plastic, malleable moment. There is reason for hope, but there are warning signs as well.

Transcribed by: Minhazul Abedin