Book Talk: David C. Engerman's "Apostles of Development"

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.

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David Engerman is a scholar of twentieth-century international history. Building on his dual training in American and Russian/Soviet history at the University of California-Berkeley (where he received his Ph.D. in 1998), he wrote two books on the place of Russia and the USSR in American intellectual and political life: Modernization from the Other Shore: American Intellectuals and the Romance of Russian Development (Harvard UP, 2003) and Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts (Oxford UP, 2009).

He has also researched and written on a variety of topics related to the history of development assistance, including a co-edited volume, Staging Growth: Modernization, Development and the Global Cold War (University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), and most recently a monograph, The Price of Aid: The Economic Cold War in India (Harvard UP, 2018). This research was also the topic of his presidential address for the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations in 2016. Research for The Price of Aid was supported by grants and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Institute of Indian Studies, the American Philosophical Society, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, the National Council for Eurasian and East European Studies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Eisenhower, Johnson and Truman presidential libraries.

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