[6] After completing his PhD at Cambridge, Sugata Bose began his career as a professor of history and diplomacy at Tufts University.

The biography, a trade book,[8] has been criticised in scholarly reviews for soft-pedaling or oversimplifying Subhas Chandra Bose's alliances with Italian Fascism, German National Socialism, and Japanese imperialism.

[12][13][14][15] In his earlier A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (2006), Bose attempts to challenge the thesis pioneered by Kirti N. Chaudhuri in Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750, Cambridge University Press, 1985, ISBN 9780521285421 and developed by Andre Wink and others, which holds that the world's first "global economy," the trans-Indian-ocean maritime economy—whose trade was assisted by the alternating winds and currents of the monsoons and which arose in the wake of the spread of Islam—was in turn undercut by European capitalism in the early 18th century.

[16] Instead, Bose contends, in the main thesis of his book, an inter-regional economy of middle-level bazaar merchants and traders continued well into the late 1920s, existing between the dominant European capitalists at the top and the peasants and peddlers at the bottom.

Agrarian Bengal: Economy, Social Structure and Politics, 1919–1947, published in 1986, contextualised rural economic life within the wider currents of the global economy,[citation needed] while a 1993 contribution to the New Cambridge History of India, Peasant Labour and Colonial Capital: Rural Bengal since 1770, analysed two and a half centuries of regional economic and social change.

In 2007, Krishna and Sugata Bose co-edited Purabi: the East in its Feminine Gender, a book and CD of Tagore's poetry and music.

[25] Beyond his work at Harvard and Tufts, Bose has helped steer two major projects advancing higher education in India.