10 - Rajendra Chola's Naval Expedition and the Chola Trade with Southeast and East Asia

Summary

Since ancient times, India had active maritime trade relations with many countries around the Indian Ocean. In the medieval period, South Indian states were particularly involved in this trade. Kings used to get a good deal of their income from trade and could thus afford to maintain a large army and build a powerful navy without exhausting their land revenue base, which was mostly confined to the fertile core area of their dominion.

Around AD 1000, there was a remarkable change in the structure of Asian maritime trade. The previous pattern of pre-emporia trade changed into a new pattern of emporia trade. Whereas in the phase of pre-emporia trade goods were shipped directly from the place of origin to that of final consumption, the rise of emporia, particularly along the Indian coasts, implied new practices of re-export, such as breaking bulk or assorting shipments according to the demands of various ports of call. This major change in the pattern of Asian maritime trade was related to the simultaneous rise of powerful corporate empires in several parts of Asia: the Chola empire of South India, the Khmer empire of Cambodia, the empire of Champa in Vietnam, and China under the Song dynasty emerged in the early eleventh century AD. Most of these witnessed a large-scale increase in local and long-distance trade and the rapid extension of rice cultivation. The goods traded were not limited to luxury items and were diversified to include a wide variety of commodities such as processed iron, spices, sandalwood, camphor, pearls, textiles, as well as animals such as horses and elephants. Customs duties played a major role in the budgets of these corporate empires, which was different from the land-revenue-based agrarian states. The political order of these medieval corporate empires was not so much that of territorial sovereignty, but of a corporate network of rulers, merchants, temples, priests, and/or royal officers. A brief survey of the rise of the Chola empire and of China under the Song dynasty will illustrate this new development.

RAJENDRA — “THE KADARAM KONDAN”

Tamil Nadu was ruled by the early Cholas between the first and fourth centuries CE. Karikalan was the first and most famous king, who built the Kallanai (Kall — stone, Anai – bound), a dam across the Kaveri River, which is considered to be an engineering marvel of that time.