Oct 15 2025 to Oct 15 2025 6:30 p.m.

Where

Bangalore International Centre

7 4th Main Rd, Stage 2, Domlur 560071

Event Description

Professor Engerman’s new book, Apostles of Development, uses the lives and work of six South Asians who completed the Economics Tripos at Cambridge in the mid-1950s to recount the history of development over their long careers. The six include three Indians (distinguished economist Jagdish Bhagwati, Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, and former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh) as well as the inventor of the Human Development Index (Mahbub ul Haq, Pakistan), an activist for independent Bangladesh (Rehman Sobhan), and the founding director of a UN development institute (Lal Jayawardena, Sri Lanka).It draws on 90+ interviews as well as archival materials from ten countries to argue that international development was as much a project of the Global South as the Global North, and that it has worked by deriving theories from attempts to solve specific problems.

In collaboration with:

Speaker

David C Engerman
Leitner International Interdisciplinary Professor of History, Yale University
David C. Engerman, Leitner International Interdisciplinary Professor of History and Global Affairs, teaches international history at Yale University.

Between receiving his Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley in 1998 and joining Yale in 2018, he was on the faculty at Brandeis University. In 2016, he served as elected president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.

He is the author of four books most recently Apostles of Development: Six Economists and the World They Made (Penguin/Random House-India, Oxford, 2025); he is also the editor or co-editor of multiple collections, including a volume of the new Cambridge History of America and the World.