British-born Barbara Ward was educated at the Sorbonne and Oxford, where she took first-class honors in philosophy, politics, and economics. In 1939 she joined the staff of the Economist, becoming foreign editor the following year. For four years, beginning in 1946, she served as a governor of the British Broadcasting Company. In the years that followed she was Carnegie Fellow and Visiting Scholar at Harvard, Albert Schweitzer Professor at Columbia, and a member of the Pontifical Commission of Justice and Peace. An outstanding authority on world political, social, and economic issues, Barbara Ward has written many books for the general reader. In her Five Ideas That Change the World (1959) the ideas are nationalism, industrialism, colonialism, communism, and internationalism. In another work, India and the West (1961), she defined the urgency of India's desperate economic requirements and outlined a specific program for their accomplishment. Of it Edward Weeks wrote in the Atlantic: "Ward's new book . . . is in many respects the most important she has ever written. The qualities which she brings to her writing---her gift for historical analysis, her explanation of difficult economic problems, and her reasonable faith in the initiative of the free world---were never more needed." The Rich Nations and the Poor Nations (1962), which President Lyndon Johnson remarked "excites and inspires me" and Adlai Stevenson found "exceedingly important," was described in the New York Times Book Review by Eric F. Goldman as "wondrously lucid, richly informed and trenchantly argued, tough-minded but never failing to assume that intelligence and will can move human society forward.
