About the event

The King's India Institute and the Department of Political Economy at KCL invite you to join us for a book event in celebration of Professor David Engerman's new monograph, Apostles of Development: Six Economists and the World They Made (Oxford 2025).

Apostles of Development traces the intertwined lives and legacies of six Cambridge University classmates—Amartya Sen, Manmohan Singh, Jagdish Bhagwati, Lal Jayawardena, Rehman Sobhan and Mahbub ul Haq—who helped transform international development into one of the most powerful global enterprises of the late twentieth century. Through their ideas and actions, they shaped how the world sought to reduce poverty and inequality, influencing billions of lives and trillions in aid and investment as newly independent nations pursued economic as well as political freedom. Drawing on archives from ten countries and interviews with the subjects, their families, and nearly a hundred associates, the book blends biography and global history to reveal how these figures reframed both the theory and practice of development beyond the Cold War, illuminating the enduring quest for a more prosperous and equitable world.

Speaker

David Engerman

David Engerman is the Leitner International Interdisciplinary Professor of History at Yale University, where he teaches in the History Department and the Jackson School of Global Affairs. He is the author or editor of six books, including The Price of Aid: The Economic Cold War in India (Harvard University Press, 2018) and, most recently, Apostles of Development: Six Economists and the World They Made (Penguin/Random House-India and Oxford University Press, 2025). He served as elected president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations in 2016.

Discussant

Humeira Iqtidar

Humeira Iqtidar is Professor of Politics at King's College London. Her research bring together postcolonial theory, comparative political theory and Islamic thought with a focus on modern South Asia. Thematically, her research has been concerned with questions of justice and tolerance, the place of religion in contemporary political imagination, the politics of knowledge, and the legacies of colonialism. Methodologically, she has argued for greater interdisciplinary and cross disciplinary research.

Agnieszka Sobocinska

Agnieszka Sobocinska is Professor of Global History and Director of the Australia Studies Institute at King’s College London. Agnieszka’s research explores the intersections between history, politics and geography in the contexts of international development, North-South contacts, and Australia-Asia relations. Agnieszka is the author of 'Saving the World? Western Volunteers and the Rise of the Humanitarian-Development Complex' (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and 'Visiting the Neighbours: Australians in Asia' (UNSW Press, 2014).

Chair

Poornima Paidipaty

Poornima Paidipaty is a Lecturer in Comparative Political Economy at King's College London. Her work explores the changing history of social and economic inequality, with a particular focus on South Asia. She is currently undertaking a major new research project examining the role of data in economic governance in postcolonial India. She was previously an LSE Fellow in Inequalities.

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