The Many Lives of Development Economics: An Interview with David Engerman
Development economics has lived many lives—ranging from the technocratic optimism of the postwar era to the critical reappraisals of inequality and human development that followed. In Apostles of Development: Six Economists and the World They Made (Oxford University Press, 2025), historian David Engerman traces this intellectual and institutional evolution through the intertwined biographies of six South Asian economists—Jagdish Bhagwati, Mahbub ul Haq, Lal Jayawardena, Amartya Sen, Manmohan Singh, and Rehman Sobhan—who met as students at Cambridge in the 1950s and went on to redefine the field across universities, governments, and international organizations.
Engerman situates these figures within the broader transformation of global economic thought, from early postcolonial planning to the human development paradigm of the late twentieth century. In doing so, he challenges the conventional narrative that development ideas flowed from the Global North to the Global South, showing instead how South Asian economists shaped—and often anticipated—the major debates of their time.
I spoke with David Engerman about the making of Apostles of Development, the role of biography in writing the history of ideas, and how the field of development economics continues to grapple with the legacies of its past.
— Sergio Infante, Yale University
SI: Apostles of Development builds on a long line of biographies of development economists. A shortlist of the more recent and influential texts includes Robert Tignor’s W. Arthur Lewis and the Birth of Development Economics (2006), Edgar Dosman’s The Life and Times of Raúl Prebisch, 1901–1986 (2008), and Jeremy Adelman’s Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (2013). One could go so far as to say that the pioneering works in the history of economics, broadly, and the history of development economics, more specifically, have often been biographies.
But Apostles of Development has a twist. You profile not one, but six economists—Jagdish Bhagwati, Mahbub ul Haq, Lal Jayawardena, Amartya Sen, Manmohan Singh, and Rehman Sobhan—all of whom, as you put it, “shared not only a generation but also a subject and an alma mater.” How did you come up with the idea for this book?
DE: Originally, I sought a group of five pioneers in development (to crib a term from a famous autobiographical collection) from across the Global South—Latin America, East Asia, and the Caribbean, in addition to South Asia. The idea was to show that most development ideas had adherents and even roots in the Global South—the debate was not (or at least not just) North-South but had plenty of variety and energy coming from the Global South. In that original formulation, I could never answer the question, usually asked innocently, “why this group of economists”? A conversation with my colleague Rohit De pointed me to the longstanding tradition of South Asians coming to Cambridge University to study. As I looked into the economics students at Cambridge in the mid-1950s, I found six very impressive South Asian economists who shared some common ground but still held sharply different economic ideas.
As for the larger question about biography, prompted by the spate of excellent single-subject biographies in our field: I’ve long felt that biographies are excellent vehicles for some kinds of intellectual history, especially those works making claims about the origins of ideas, on the one hand, and about the relationship of ideas and practices, on the other. This is amply illustrated by one of my favorite scholarly biographies: Nick Salvatore’s Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist(1982). Salvatore shows how Debs’s socialism was not (as many critics insisted) a foreign import; it was Debs’s way of explaining American experiences—and seeking to change them. Development economics, a field self-consciously bridging ideas and practice, is particularly well-suited for biographical approaches.
SI: South Asia had a long and rich tradition of development thinking even prior to your protagonists’ rise to fame. Benjamin Zachariah has documented this well in Developing India: An Intellectual and Social History (2005). How do your economists distinguish themselves from British India and Ceylon’s pre-independence intellectual traditions and debates?
DE: As you rightly note, there was a rich vein of economic thought in British India well back into the colonial period (during which a number of important universities were built) and even before. (This is less true of colonial Ceylon, in part because it had a small and relatively new higher education system dating back only to the 1920s.). The result was that the six economists I discuss in Apostles were exposed to vibrant debates and sophisticated analytical work in South Asia. Indeed, in some ways economics training in India and Pakistan may have been richer and more sophisticated than the Economic Tripos in Cambridge. For instance, Amartya Sen complained that economics at Cambridge was something of a letdown after his studies at Presidency College in Calcutta—both for the rich political debate, I think, as well as the Cambridge economics faculty’s severe allergy to mathematics.
That said, one of the overriding questions in academic economics in late colonial India was that of “Indian economics.” The debate revolved around whether Indians could be understood as homo economicus, or whether they were driven by different concerns; this conversation was of limited relevance to mainstream—i.e., European/North Atlantic—economic analysis.
Beginning their economics studies after independence in 1947/48, they benefitted from the works of Indian economists to shift the terrain of the debate from a kind of “Indian economics” essentialism into questions more immediately legible in the United Kingdom and United States, like how well Keynesianism applied (or didn’t apply) to countries like independent India. The six Apostles had little patience for the older questions, and some were wary of even teaching courses on the region for fear it would just resurrect the musty question about Indian economic behavior.
SI: Set the scene for us at the moment of your economists’ staggered arrivals at the University of Cambridge. How did their experiences there shape their careers and thinking?
DE: The most important thing to know about the six economists’ arrival at Cambridge between 1953 and 1955 is that most of them had already studied economics in their home country. Two of the six had earned BA degrees at venerable local universities; two more had even earned MA degrees. (Of the remaining two, one studied for one year in the top university in his country and the other told me he never even considered university studies in South Asia.). In spite of Cambridge’s high view of itself—even more true of the Cambridge Faculty of Economics—these six did not arrive there as tabulae rasae economically speaking.
When they got to Cambridge, there was no field of development economics, not even a single lecture or (so far as I can tell) tutorial on the topic. This wasn’t just Cambridge; few if any top universities in the United States or Europe offered courses on the subject. This seeming disadvantage was actually an advantage; students were exposed to a wide range of economic subfields, from labor economics to international trade to public finance, so they built extensive disciplinary “toolboxes” that they could—and did—apply to questions of economic development.
Finally, for some of this group at least, Cambridge offered a chance to conceptualize—and instantiate—South Asia. While there were separate groups for Indian and for Pakistani students at Cambridge, most came together in the Cambridge Majlis or at the clutch of Indian restaurants that offered a respite from the “meat-potato-two-veg” pre-globalized English cuisine. The commitment to South Asian collectivity always had to compete against various other commitments but I’d say was important nonetheless.
SI: Very soon after they arrive, development economics crystallized into a standalone subfield in economics. This was a moment in which development typically meant growth, and growth typically meant capital-intensive manufacturing. Your economists would later become prominent critics of this consensus. But before we get ahead of ourselves, what was their initial reaction to 1950s and 1960s development paradigms?
DE: The Apostles were, individually and collectively, exceptional—but this quality didn’t appear in their early views of growth, which were well within the mainstream. I was surprised to find early writings by Amartya Sen and Rehman Sobhan—two of the most critical of standard models of economic development—that shared elements with the newly emerging conventional wisdom that you pithily summarized. Success would be measured by per capita national income (first GNP, later GDP). Expanding industrial production would be crucial. Since poor countries were generally poor in capital, the challenge was to create investible surplus, either through domestic savings or international capital flows in the form of aid. Mahbub ul Haq, who was later vocal in his dissent from such a paradigm, was perhaps the most vociferous proponent of this model; the key to development, he wrote, was “making the laborer produce more than he [sic] is allowed to consume.” He later came to oppose this view, in the process blaming his earlier views on his education in the “citadels of western leaning.” Not all of the six held the same views, and their views evolved over time. That said, given their later efforts, I was surprised how much of the 1950s growth paradigm they had imbibed and accepted.
SI: I want to zoom in on Bhagwati, Sen, and Singh for a moment. Tell me about the “D School.”
DE: The Delhi School of Economics (fondly called the D School) is perhaps the paradigmatic postcolonial educational institution, not just in South Asia but across the postcolonial world. Its founder and guiding light was the renowned economist V.K.R.V. Rao, a Cambridge economics alumnus from the 1930s, reputed to be John Maynard Keynes’s best Indian student. The D School was connected to the sprawling University of Delhi but ran quite independently. Its purpose was to gather economists from across the new nation, set them to work training students and making themselves available for formal and informal consultation with government ministries. Bhagwati, Sen, and Singh were all hired there in the early 1960s (along with Sen’s Presidency College classmate Sukhamoy Chakravarti). By this time, K.N. Raj had replaced Rao—one legendary economist succeeding another. The D School’s students and faculty, especially in the early years, felt a tremendous pride and esprit de corps; it was revelatory to many that India did not need British or American economics teachers at their top institutions, but that Indians themselves could do the job. Though Raj leaned to the left, he was quite evenhanded in his hiring, as evidenced by bringing two people centrally interested in promoting international trade, a right-wing position at the time.
SI: One of the things that I find remarkable about your book is how you manage to keep these six very different economists aligned even though their careers diverged so markedly after leaving Cambridge. Aside from highlighting the institutions that brought them together, how did you accomplish this?
DE: Thanks for your enthusiasm. You’re exactly right that focusing on institutions allowed me to bundle the Apostles into smaller groups—Bhagwati, Sen, and Singh at the D School; Mahbub ul Haq and Sobhan arguing over Pakistani economic planning; Singh and Lal Jayawardena at the United Nations Economic Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), etc. I spent a lot of time wrestling with this but ultimately decided that I needed lots of small chapters that would allow me to change locations frequently. Alas, in the usual manner of things some of those chapters grew pretty large. To figure out the chapter structure, I looked for overlaps. I even created a spreadsheet of where each Apostle was and what he was doing from each year from birth until the 2010s—though I’m reluctant to admit to such primitive tactics to a crowd of sophisticated international historians.
SI: That’s a fascinating window onto your process, David. Returning to our main narrative, what was “export pessimism”?
DE: One interesting thing about the Apostles is that a few of their concepts became buzzwords in their countries and beyond for decades. One of these terms is “export pessimism,” or what Manmohan Singh called “export fatalism.” Like a lot of labels, this term was formulated by its critics—Singh included. The phrase referred to the argument, ubiquitous in 1950s and early 1960s India, that the country could not really count on increased exports as a tool of growth. Since demand for the kinds of primary goods that India could export was inelastic, increasing the supply of, say, jute would depress the world price and result in reduced export revenue. (In one of his famous early articles, Bhagwati called this phenomenon “immiserizing growth.”) But Singh argued that no one had actually tested this fatalism (or pessimism), instead just taking it as given. His dissertation was a book-length argument against this line of thinking, offering very specific suggestions of which commodities would find which export markets.
SI: By the end of the 1960s, many development economists were turning away from a “growth-for-growth’s-sake” mindset and becoming more critical about what the goals of good development policy should be. How did your economists fit into this picture?
DE: The Apostles fit very well into the late-1960s questioning of reigning ideas of development. Mahbub ul Haq was especially vocal here, publicly rejecting his previous enthusiasm for growth at all costs—starting with a famous speech in Karachi in 1968 that South Asians remember as “Twenty-two families.” This term, like “export pessimism,” lives on in South Asia to mean interlocking economic and political power. (The fact that Haq originally spoke of twenty families, like the fact that he based his argument on the work of his wife, economist Khadija Haq, is usually forgotten.) Rehman Sobhan, too, challenged the growth-first strategy, insisting that the new state of Bangladesh—which he played a role in creating—would feature a more equitable economic system. And Amartya Sen offered occasional criticisms of India’s development strategy from the left; his powerful ideas about people being both “the means and the ends of development” didn’t emerge until later. The others, too, challenged the growth paradigm of the 1950s and 1960s—not so much by opposing growth-first but in their insistence that trade would be an engine of development; this applied to Singh and Bhagwati, and in a way to Lal Jayawardena as well.
SI: I first encountered Mahbub ul Haq when reading his best-known texts, which were largely written while he was at the World Bank. Haq came across as a charming and loudmouthed 1970s radical. Other scholars, such as historian Joanne Meyerowitz, echo this view. What did Haq’s attempts to redefine development at the World Bank amount to? And how “lefty” did his 1970s politics look when viewed from South Asia?
DE: Yes, definitely charming. Though I never got a chance to meet him—he died young, in 1998—some of the “World Chronicle” videos available on the UN’s YouTube channel reveal him as earnest, well-spoken, and with many memorable turns of phrase. But radical? Haq trod a careful line, trying to be as radical as he could while still working in the international establishment’s inner circle. It’s true that his anger about the fate of poorer countries is evident, for instance, in his “Crisis of Development Strategies” speech from 1973. Yet he gave and then published that speech while working in the office of the World Bank’s president. Maybe he was a little like the conservative columnists in the New York Times’sOpinion pages, whom I think of as the liberals’ favorite conservatives, but of course Haq was the other way around: he was the liberals’ favorite radical.
But those radical sentiments were heard primarily when Haq was operating in the international sphere. At home in Pakistan, he was equally willing to work with military dictators such as Field Marshal Mohammad Ayub Khan and General Mohammad Zia ul-Haq as he was with socialist Zulfikar Bhutto (though his efforts to join Bhutto’s cabinet came to naught). And he emphasized the more conventional elements of his economic thinking while working in Pakistan. I have to confess that this realization came to me only in a jarring experience in Pakistan in 2019, when I was taken aback by the scathing views that young Pakistani scholars held of Haq. They excoriated him for his work with developmental dictator Ayub Khan and especially for his work with General Zia ul-Haq, whom these scholars blamed for the Islamization of the Pakistani state.
Haq, the economist, changed venues and thus political expressions with the decades. In even-numbered decades, he worked for Pakistani dictators speaking the language of conventional economics, while in odd-numbered decades he worked in international arenas like the World Bank and the United Nations Development Programme and espoused liberal or, yes, even radical views.
SI: The middle of your book focuses largely on disappointments. Attempts to reform the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or create a New International Economic Order (NIEO) both ran aground on the shoals of Cold War politics. Historian Nils Gilman has called such episodes “unfailures,” experiences that continue to offer productive resources for the present. Is that how you were conceptualizing these battles?
DE: As much as I admire Nils Gilman and consider him one of the smartest non-university thinkers about recent history and our own times, I’m not sure I’m ready to follow him down the road of “unfailure.” For starters, I think that the NIEO itself came about as a result of defeats. The World Bank moved left in the early 1970s—thanks to Haq’s efforts as well as those of British economist Barbara Ward and many others—but the Bank was hardly ready to meet the poorer countries halfway or even less. Sure, the institution turned towards “Basic Human Needs” and adopted a more capacious sense of the goals of development. Yet it was hardly ready to contribute to the making of a more just world in economic terms. I suppose it’s a version of “bankers gonna bank.” While the loans were for different goals, and while the Bank slowly expanded the range of issues covered to include Women in Development and Basic Human Needs, what would come to be called human development, and the environment, the World Bank was in the business of making loans to governments and making sure those loans were paid back.
The Global South had even less luck trying to reform the international financial system and its principal guarantor, the IMF. In the early 1970s, the IMF board created a Committee on Reform of the International Monetary System and Related Issues—known by the briefer but no more informative name Committee of Twenty—that spent two years debating ways in which the international financial system, and the IMF itself, might contribute to the cause of the Global South. After two years, it published a report detailing over 190 pages of disagreements and about five pages of agreements.
This history of failure suggests that the declaration of a New International Economic Order, or NIEO, was a last-ditch effort to flex the Global South’s numerical muscle in the United Nations General Assembly. It was, in short, a clear case of venue-shopping. Unfortunately, no United Nations organ, and certainly not the General Assembly, could bring into being most of the structures demanded in the NIEO. Yes, it might have been an “unfailure” that animated a number of efforts to create an equitable world in the 1970s and 1980s. But those efforts accomplished little and the institutions behind them soon faded away.
SI: Now comes what your book denominates “Part IV. Rightward Turn, 1980s.” Can you set the big picture for us?
DE: The turn to the right was both top-down and bottom-up. I’ll start with the more familiar top-down story—the elections of Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom in 1979 and Ronald Reagan in the United States in 1980, the rise of Structural Adjustment at the World Bank and the IMF—I think it’s important to note the ways in which most of the liberalization ideas had important and even powerful proponents across the Global South. The call for fiscal austerity, a sharp departure from the spendy 1970s, was not just disseminated from London, Frankfurt, and Washington—but found many advocates in places like Sri Lanka and India. Among the Apostles, both Lal Jayawardena and Manmohan Singh worked within their respective governments to reduce regulations, expand foreign trade, and even expand the flow of capital into their respective countries. Two South Asian economists based in London made a similar case: these were Deepak Lal (from India) and Hla Myint (from Burma). So, too, did Jagdish Bhagwati from his positions as a professor of economics at MIT and then Columbia University. So, the big picture is that there were various recipes to solve the problem of debt, especially development debt, as well as low productivity growth, across the Global South.
SI: Singh figures as a particularly adept and stealthy reformer. How did India open up to global trade prior to its official liberalization in the 1990s?
DE: Most observers agree that summer 1991 was an inflection point in Indian history, especially in its economic history. In short order, Manmohan Singh, as Finance Minister, together with Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao, in one fell swoop overturned the fundamental tenets of Indian economic policy: the left bemoaned (and bemoans) the change, the right celebrated (and celebrates) it.
Yet prior to 1991, a few commentators noted some tentative, modest, and largely technical steps that reduced regulation, provided incentives for exports, and tried to make India’s publicly owned industries more effective, or at least less unprofitable. These policies often came with little fanfare but changed how certain regulations would be enforced. They also tweaked the formula for how the Indian government figured the exchange rate (so that the government could devalue the rupee without announcing a devaluation). Jagdish Bhagwati, always good with a phrase, called this period in the 1980s “reforms by stealth,” a contrast with 1991’s “reforms by storm.” And Singh was the perfect person to undertake quiet reforms. In the 1970s and 1980s, he held major posts at the Ministry of Finance, the Planning Commission, and the Reserve Bank of India. And he was known, and largely appreciated, as a technocrat rather than a politician.
A side note: it wouldn’t be right to say that opening to global trade was a priority in these stealthy reforms. As political scientist Atul Kohli aptly observed, these 1980s reforms were more “pro-business” than “pro-market”—and if there was one thing that Indian business wanted, it was protection from international competition. So, the stealthy reforms included an unannounced devaluation (which would make Indian exports more appealing) but did little to open up Indian markets to trade and investment.
SI: During the 1980s and 1990s, mainstream economists recentered growth as the main goal of development. Meanwhile, such people as Sen and Haq were arguing for what you call “a WIDER view,” punning on the acronym of the United Nation’s World Institute for Development Economics Research. What were the capabilities approach and the Human Development Index or HDI?
DE: Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach, which he worked out over the 1980s, was an effort to expand the desiderata of development. We’ve already discussed the critiques of GDP per capita that emerged from many sources starting in the late 1960s. But Sen’s approach was more rigorous, at least in philosophical terms. The purpose of development, he argued, was not about maximizing what goods could be purchased but instead about what “good” those goods did. It was about expanding choices for the poor; material well-being was helpful, but to Sen it was the means and not the end of development. Sen’s language here is a little abstruse—a lot of attention to the relationship between “capabilities” and “functionings”—but the main point was to provide all people with the “real ability to lead the kind of life they have reason to value.” Sen, determined to keep the decisions with the population writ large, refused to enumerate what would be necessary—much to the chagrin of his coauthor, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum.
While capabilities offered—indeed, still offer—a very productive way of thinking about development, it was hard to know how to operationalize the approach’s insights—let alone measure them. But Mahbub ul Haq was determined to formulate an alternative measure to GDP per capita so needed something pretty straightforward. Haq succeeded in making his Human Development Index ubiquitous but at the cost of some simplicity; without nerding out on the formulas, the index combined measures of life expectancy, literacy, and (surprisingly) GDP per capita to produce rankings of all the nations of the world along the lines of human development. Sen offered some of the language and the intellectual heft to human development as a concept but remained wary of the index. Indeed, he called the index “crude” and referred to its “vulgarity”—even at a memorial for Haq.
My own reading is that human development invoked Sen’s ideas but that the index was a bridge too far for Sen. Indeed, Sen had already been working on a multidimensional index with a group of Latin American economists before Haq recruited him to his own cause. That said, the current Human Development Report Office at the UNDP is anchored by the Mahbub ul Haq Seminar Room at one end of the floor and the Amartya Sen Library on the other.
SI: Writing the history of things that have taken place over the past 20 to 30 years presents special difficulties. How did you approach the final chapters of the book?
DE: Good question! It felt kind of strange writing “history” about the period since the 1980s. I recall an old joke that the dividing line between history and political science was that if the professor didn’t remember an event, it was historical; otherwise, it counted as history. I didn’t encounter human development when it first appeared in 1990—at that point I was captivated by the transformation and the collapse of the Soviet Union, not international development. But much of the backdrop to human development were things I read in the daily newspaper. And the book goes up through about 2014 before it shifts into more of an epilogue mode. While late 20th-century history suffers from a surfeit of sources, this is even more true of the early 21st century. Far more materials were born-digital, so Google searches became more of a tool. And I had to stay on guard about using my own recollections as evidence.
Another aspect of writing about recent history was the fact that when I started the project, four of the six Apostles were alive. (Manmohan Singh died in December 2024.) So, too, were many of their friends, family, rivals, and students. So, I spoke with lots and lots of people—close to 100—who knew one or another of the Apostles. This was a very enriching experience but a complicated one; people have their own memories and interpretations of the period that required understanding and navigating. On the other hand, one benefit of doing the interviews is that they provide a reminder that our historical subjects should be able to find themselves in a historian’s work. We need not agree with our subjects, but we should understand what motivated them, what they were trying to accomplish. We shouldn’t, of course, stop there; that would be simply serving as a scribe or amanuensis. But we should understand at least what our subject thought they were doing.
SI: When reading Apostles, Singh’s late-in-life political career took me by surprise. Of course, I knew Singh for being prime minister of India from 2004 to 2014. But having read about his life from the beginning made the turn to politics seem surprising and abrupt. For my own work, I have been thinking about German philosopher Theodor Adorno’s concept of a “late style,” a mode of action or expression that only surfaces toward the end of a person’s career. Do you think that Singh had a distinctive “late style” as prime minister or was his political persona the same as the expert persona he had honed over the decades?
DE: It’s a good question, and a common one in India (though usually without reference to Adorno). Sen argued that Singh’s economic ideas held steady over much of his life; he was committed to markets but also to eradicating poverty. And that was something that Singh—unlike his fellow Apostles—knew firsthand. It’s also a hard question to unpack since Singh spent the 1970s and 1980s in midlevel and then more senior government posts. Whatever he may have thought, he was charged with directing some aspects of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s socialism of the early 1970s. And he did so, to all reports, loyally. I did find a couple of moments where he tried to push economic liberalism but carefully couched in the ruling Indian Congress Party’s keywords of the day. And there are those—including some of my mentors and good friends—who would argue that any equity-oriented policies that emerged during Singh’s decade as prime minister came about over his opposition. But it’s really hard to know without access to more sources; right now, any answer to that question is caught up in partisan polemics, by which I mean that most retrospective accounts are more interested in arguing about the Singh years than they are in explaining their origins.
SI: We’ve skipped over a few episodes from Apostles. That’s bound to happen when you have such rich and lengthy material, as you do. But now that we’re nearing the present, I want to ask: What lessons do you hope readers will take away from Apostles of Development?
DE: I try—in spite of your opening question—to describe Apostles of Development as a history of international development, and not as a collective biography. Especially in South Asia, the responses tend to focus on the hometown boys—so in Sri Lanka lots of questions about Lal Jayawardena, in India lots of questions about the three Indian Apostles, etc. But as a history of international development, I hope to flip the common historical narrative that sees economic ideas as emerging out of the Global North and circulating to the Global South. I argue that development began not with the British Colonial Development Acts or the French mise en valeur or the American Point Four Program. Instead, it began as a practical effort in the poor countries seeking to become less so. To be sure, they were shaped by a larger (North Atlantic-dominated) economics profession. It’s also worth noting that development was formulated and executed, for the most part, by local elites. But the process was fundamentally about the Global South. In this sense, the project is an extension of the argument I made in my last book, The Price of Aid. A second point I’m hoping came out in the book is that development economics—and perhaps economics in general—is not a field that saw innovations emerge from theory and descend into practice; instead, economic theories took shape in an effort to confront the problems directly in front of them.
SI: And what about your ongoing work? Does Apostles connect to your current research?
DE: A good question, but a hard one to answer. I’m trying to think about international development in a broader scope, not centered on South Asia, as my last two books were. But for the first time in my career, I don’t have a plan for, or even an inkling of, a research monograph.
SI: Thank you, David, for this enlightening conversation.
DE: Thank you.
Sergio Infante is an Editor at Large for the Toynbee Prize Foundation and is a doctoral candidate in History at Yale University.
David Engerman is the Leitner International Interdisciplinary Professor of History at Yale University. A historian of twentieth-century international and economic thought, his research explores the global politics of development, modernization, and inequality. Before joining Yale, he spent nearly two decades at Brandeis University. Engerman is the author of several influential books, including Modernization from the Other Shore: American Intellectuals and the Romance of Russian Development (2003), Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts (2009), and The Price of Aid: The Economic Cold War in India (2018).