Archisman Chaudhuri

Archisman Chaudhuri was a postdoctoral researcher at the Indian Ocean World Centre from 2019-2021.

I pursued my Bachelor’s degree in History at Presidency College, Kolkata, and my Master’s degree at Jawaharlal Nehru University, in New Delhi, India. In 2012, I was awarded a Cosmopolis scholarship to pursue a Bachelor’s degree at the University of Leiden, The Netherlands which I completed in 2013. An Erasmus Mundus scholarship enabled me to continue my studies at Leiden at the PhD level. Primarily exploring the archives of the VOC (the Dutch East India Company), my doctoral thesis researched the impact of the southern military campaigns (1682-1707) of Mughal emperor Aurangzeb (r. 1658-1707) on the economy of the Coromandel Coast- a major trading hub of the erstwhile Indian Ocean and a crucial link in the VOC’s intra-Asian trade.

At present, I am a postdoctoral researcher affiliated to the IOWC. Using the archives of the VOC, my current project researches the impact of droughts and famines in Coromandel and in island South-East Asia in the seventeenth century. On the basis of its findings, my research proposes to examine Geoffrey Parker’s assertion that the immunity or otherwise of communities to vagaries of weather determined the impact of climatic shifts and revisit the idea of a seventeenth-century climate crisis in the context of the aforementioned regions. My research interests include the Indian Ocean, the Mughal Empire, the VOC, economic history, environmental history, and military history.

Full CV

Select Publications

‘’Trade in the Shaping of Early Modern India: Notes on the Deccan’,’ Indian Ocean in the Making of Early Modern India ed. Pius Malekandathil (New Delhi: Manohar, 2016): 75-109