Foundation
In 1639 the East India Company's agents Francis Day and Andrew Cogan obtained a grant of a strip of coast from Damarla Venkatadri Nayaka, a local chief serving the last Vijayanagara emperors, to build a fort and trading post. Fort St George was completed in 1644, and a settlement grew around it, the White Town of the English and the Black Town of Indian merchants and weavers. The fort grew to absorb older settlements nearby: Mylapore, with the Kapaleeshwarar temple and the Portuguese church of San Thome built over what tradition holds is the tomb of the apostle Thomas, and Triplicane, with the Parthasarathy temple.
The Carnatic wars
In 1746, during the War of the Austrian Succession, a French fleet under La Bourdonnais captured Madras, and it was returned to the British in 1749 by treaty. The struggle between the British and French companies in the Carnatic that followed made the reputation of Robert Clive, who had come to Madras as a clerk. Madras became the capital of a presidency that, by the nineteenth century, covered most of south India.
The colonial city
Madras was a city of government and education rather than industry. The University of Madras was founded in 1857, and the city's institutions trained the officials and professionals of the south. Its buildings range from the eighteenth-century Fort St George, with St Mary's Church, the oldest Anglican church east of Suez, to the Indo-Saracenic High Court and Central Station of the late nineteenth century. The Theosophical Society had its headquarters at Adyar from 1882.
The city was also the centre of the non-Brahmin movement. The Justice Party, founded in 1916, and the Self-Respect Movement of E. V. Ramasamy, Periyar, from the 1920s, laid the foundations of the Dravidian politics that has dominated Tamil Nadu since 1967.
Modern Chennai
After independence Madras became the capital of Madras State, renamed Tamil Nadu in 1969. The city was renamed Chennai, from the name of a neighbouring village recorded in early documents, in 1996. It has grown into a major centre of the automobile, software and health industries. It was struck by the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004 and by severe floods in 2015.
Further reading
- Bayly, C. A. Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire. Cambridge University Press, 1988
- Metcalf, Barbara D. A Concise History of Modern India. Cambridge University Press, 2012
- Guha, Ramachandra. India After Gandhi. Macmillan, 2007
See also
- East India Company — The East India Company (EIC) was an English joint-stock trading corporation, chartered in 1600, that expanded from a monopoly on Asian trade into the paramount political and military power on the Indian subcontinent before its dissolution in 1858.
- Carnatic Wars — A series of three conflicts fought between 1746 and 1763 in which the British and French East India Companies, each backing rival claimants to local thrones, competed for control of southeastern India.
- Vellore Fort — Vellore Fort is a moated granite fortress in northern Tamil Nadu, built in the sixteenth century by chiefs serving Vijayanagara, which became a seat of the last Aravidu emperors and later passed through Bijapuri, Maratha, Mughal, Carnatic and British hands.
- Vijayanagara Empire — Vijayanagara was the last great empire of southern India, founded on the Tungabhadra in 1336, ruling most of the peninsula for two centuries until its defeat at Talikota in 1565, and leaving the ruined city at Hampi.
- Chakravarti Rajagopalachari — Chakravarti Rajagopalachari was a Congress leader from Madras who served as Premier of Madras Presidency, proposed the controversial 1944 "C.R. formula" for Congress-League cooperation, and became independent India's last Governor-General and first Indian to hold the office.
This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.