The Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs will host a discussion to celebrate the publication of a new book by Jackson professor David Engerman, Apostles of Development: Six Economists and the World They Made. Speakers will include the Jackson Schools's Amit Khandelwal, Jessica Seddon, Ardina Hasanbasri and Aden Knaap.

Apostles of Development traces how six former Cambridge classmates — including Amartya Sen, Manmohan Singh, Jagdish Bhagwati — helped turn international development into one of the defining global enterprises of the post-war era, shaping how poverty reduction and inequality were theorized and implemented from the mid-1950s through the 2010s. The book argues that for much of the Global South, development — not Cold War geopolitics — was the more constant force affecting everyday life, and that the careers of these “apostles” effectively map the rise of development itself: a vast system that mobilized millions of workers, affected billions of people, and spent trillions of dollars while linking newly independent states’ aspirations for economic self-determination with wealthy nations’ efforts to build a durable global economic order. Drawing on newly opened archives from ten countries and extensive interviews with subjects, families, and nearly a hundred associates and rivals, it blends intimate biography with a wide-angle history of the modern pursuit of a more prosperous and equitable world.