[4] He received a five-year research appointment at the Australian National University in 2006, funded by an ARC Discovery fellowship, but was unable to complete it.

[6] He contributed to knowledge of the political, environmental and economic history of India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Mauritius and other Indian Ocean islands, Malawi, Ghana, Nigeria, the Southern Caribbean (especially St Vincent, Montserrat, Dominica and Tobago), Australia and New Zealand.

His major contribution has been to document the environmental history of these places through exhaustive archival research in several languages, particularly relating to the 17th–19th centuries.

His 2000 book with Australian geologist, John Chappell, documented the local effects of the disastrous 1997–1998 El Nino in Papua New Guinea and Indonesia.

[8] A festschrift volume, The British Empire and the natural world: environmental encounters in South Asia, edited by Deepak Kumar, Vinita Damadaran, and Rohan D'Souza, was published by Oxford University Press in 2011.