Chaudhuri has spent most of his adult life travelling and working in the Middle East, North Africa, South America, and Europe.
His teachers included Arthur Llewellyn Basham, Cyril Philips, William G. Beasley, C. R. Boxer, Bernard Lewis, Eric Hobsbawm, G.J.
British economic historian Sir John Habakkuk, chairman of the SSRC, personally expressed his appreciation and support for Chaudhuri’s still-unproven research and methodology.
The research grant enabled Chaudhuri to computerise the vast array of quantitative data on the Company’s transcontinental trade and shipping.
The Cambridge University Press contract led to the publication in 1985 of The Trade and Civilisation in Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750[6] and Asia before Europe in 1990.
It raises and answers the question how the identity of different Asian civilisations is established in the first place and then goes on to examine the structural features of food habits, clothing, architectural styles, and housing.
The analysis of the different modes of economic production is followed by a description of the role of crop raising, pastoral nomadism, industrial activities, and the history of urbanisation for the main regions of the Indian Ocean.
An extension of Fernand Braudel's theory of time and space, the methodology sets out precisely the logical foundation of the historical perceptions of unities and disunities, continuities, ruptures, and thresholds.
The analysis of the historical evidence leads to the conclusion that Indian Ocean societies were united or separated from one another by a conscious cultural and linguistic identity.
Below this surface level of awareness was a deeper structure of unities created by a common ecology, technology of economic production, traditions of government, theory of political obligations rights, and shared historical experience.
On Asia before Europe, Sugata Bose, Gardiner Professor of History at Harvard University, wrote: “Yet it remains an open question whether the recourse to mathematical precision fares much better than a historian’s intuitive presumptions in resolving the problem of the spatial limits of an interregional arena of human interaction.”[14] In 1991, Chaudhuri was invited to become the first Vasco da Gama Professor of the History of European Expansion at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, with the support of the Portuguese National Commission for Maritime Discoveries.
The Portuguese government and National Commission for Discoveries awarded him the Don John de Castro Prize in International History (1994).
Schifanoia Firenze has tried to maintain the standards of bookwork set by Gutenberg, Nicholas Jensen, Aldus Manutius, Claude Garamond, Bodoni, and modern designers such as Jan Tschischold, Hans Mardersteig, Bruce Rogers, and Frederick Warde.
The exquisite Japanese Kozo bark paper and the Gampi vellum are used for special reserve copies, which are bound by famous designer binders in full Morocco leather.
The first film which he directed, produced, and wrote the screen play was released in 2009 under the title The Downfall and the Redemption of Dr John Faustino.