Apostles of Development : Six Economists and the World They Made

Apostles of Development offers a bold new history of one of the most important enterprises of the 20th century--the project to end global poverty--through the lives and work of six of its most innovative practitioners, all former classmates at Cambridge University and all from the Global South. Deftly combining global history and biography, it shows how development began not in Washington or London or Paris but in the crowded cities and isolated villages of South Asia, home to some of the world''s poorest countries in the mid-twentieth century. Sweeping in scope, Apostles of Development details how these six individuals shaped the entire project of international development across the Cold War and post-Cold War eras.

Apostles of Development recounts the work of six individuals, all former classmates at Cambridge University, who helped make international development--the effort to reduce poverty and inequality around the world--into a juggernaut of the second half of the twentieth century. International development employed millions, affected billions, and spent trillions; it held the hopes of the former colonies to create an economic independence to match their newfound political one, and the plans of wealthy counties to build an enduring economic order. The six Apostles in this book include some of South Asia''s best-known names, like Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen and long-serving Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, as well as leading academics (Jagdish Bhagwati) and key policy-makers in both national and international circles. Taken together, this group both reflected and shaped the growing enterprise of international development from the time they left Cambridge in the mid-1950s well into the 2010s. For many years, the second half of the twentieth century was understood primarily through the lens of the Cold War. And yet, for the majority of the world, living in what was then called the Third World (and which is now called the Global South), development was a constant, while American-Soviet geopolitics only occasionally impinged upon their lives. And these six, as much as any other group, changed the way economists theorized development and aid officials practiced it. Their biographies, then, are the history of development. Based on newly available archival documents from 10 countries, and on interviews with four of the subjects, the widows of the other two, and almost 100 of their colleagues, friends, classmates, and rivals, this book combines riveting personal accounts with a sweeping history of one of the enduring human activities of the late 20th century and early 21st centuries: creating a more prosperous and equitable world.