A Plan of Fort St. George and the City of Madras by Herman Moll, London, 1726.
A rare map of India and Ceylon issued in 1733 by the Homann Heirs showing ports appended by English, French, Danish, Dutch or Portuguese flags to mark colonial enclaves.

Known as the 'Gateway to South India', the city of Madras was built on international trade. It was from the Southeast Indian port at Madras that the first ‘Madras handkerchiefs’ were exported in the early 1700s, alongside hundreds of other varieties of South Indian cloth then being traded worldwide. Some of the weavers who made Madras handkerchiefs worked in the city itself, but most worked in clusters, or payakats, of villages outside of town.