Madras (Chennai)Overview

The Coromandel Coast: Madras (Chennai), A Case Study

...A man's return from the sea is like his rise from the grave, and the port is like the place of congregation
on the day of Judgement: there is questioning, and settlement of accounts and weighing and counting.*
Ibn al-Mujawir ~ 13th century traveller

Fort St George, Madras, on the Coromandel Coast, 1754; Jan Van Ryne (artist), Robert Sayer (publisher)
National Maritime Museum

Madras was established in 1639 by the trader Francis Day, representing the Honourable East India Company. The East India Company had been granted a charter by Queen Elizabeth in December 1600 for a monopoly on all English trade east of the Cape of Good Hope. Company merchants sought to create trading outposts allowing direct access to highly valued Indian textile sources. Day’s land grant from the Nayak of Poonamallee (local ruler of the Vijayanagar Empire) fulfilled that objective. In the next two centuries Madras, along with Bombay and Calcutta, came to represent one of three legs of the powerful British Empire in India.

Madras’ transition from trading factory, to fortified company town, to imperial city, to today's global metropolis, provides a compelling case study for the development of an Indian Ocean port city across time and space. Currently under construction, this Web-based tutorial when completed will contain the ten components listed below .

Return to~ The Indian Ocean Littoral: Cartography and Port Cities

* epigraph from Margariti, Roxani Eleni. "Like the Place of Congregation on Judgment Day: Maritime Trade
and Urban Organization in Medieval Aden (ca. 1083-1229)" Ph.D. Dissertation (Princeton, 2002).

Created and updated by Carol A. Keller, the initial development of this website is made possible by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) 2002 Summer Institute at the University of Pennsylvania , and The United States Department of Education, Fulbright-Hays Seminars Abroad Program, India’s Cultural Heritage, Contemporary Concerns, and Challenges for the New Millennium, 2003. The website contents are reviewed regularly for accuracy and timeliness. Efforts are made to update material as the need arises in order to make this information accessible through the Internet. As with many Web Pages, these pages are often "under construction" to reflect the continuous changes in the web and in current information. Therefore, these pages may be incomplete or have missing links. Your patience is appreciated.

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