Dr. Bose was educated at Presidency College, Calcutta, and the University of Cambridge where he obtained his Ph.D. His books include Agrarian Bengal: Economy, Social Structure and Politics (1986), South Asia and World Capitalism (1990), Peasant Labour and Colonial Capital in The New Cambridge History of India series (1993), Credit, Markets and the Agrarian Economy of Colonial India (1994), Nationalism, Democracy and Development (1997, with Ayesha Jalal) and Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy (1998, 2004, with Ayesha Jalal). His much-acclaimed work, A Hundred Horizons: the Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire, was published in 2006 by Harvard University Press. In it Bose crosses area studies and disciplinary frontiers and bridges the domains of political economy and culture. Amartya Sen describes A Hundred Horizons as “an excellent historical study, full of contemporary relevance for understanding an important ancestry of present-day globalization”. He is the author of numerous scholarly articles on modern economic, social and political history. His new book His Majesty’s Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India’s Struggle against Empire is being published by Harvard University Press and Penguin India in spring 2011.
Dr. Bose is joint editor with Dr. Sisir Kumar Bose of the twelve-volume Collected Works of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and joint editor with Krishna Bose of Purabi: the East in its Feminine Gender (2007), a book of translations by Charu C. Chowdhuri of Rabindranath Tagore’s poems and songs. He has translated into English all of Tagore’s songs composed on his overseas voyages and recorded them on four CDs titled Visva Yatri Rabindranath. He has made three documentary films on modern South Asian history and politics that have been broadcast on public television in the USA and India. He was a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1997 and gave the G.M. Trevelyan Lecture at the University of Cambridge.
During the last two years Dr. Bose has delivered the Rajendranath Das Keynote Lecture at the annual South Asian Studies conference at the University of California-Berkeley, the keynote lecture at the 10th annual conference of the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale University, the Gustav Pollak Lecture 2008 at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, the keynote lecture at the Biennial Conference of the New Zealand Asia Studies Society and other lectures in India, China, Singapore and Malaysia.