Chennai was initially a small fishing village. The region around Chennai has served as an important administrative, military, and economic centre dating back to the 1st century. It has been ruled by South Indian kingdoms, notably the Pallava, the Chola, the Pandya, and Vijaynagar empires. The town of Mylapore, now part of the metropolis, was once a major port of the Pallava kingdom. When the Portuguese arrived in 1522, they built a port and named it São Tomé, after the Christian apostle St. Thomas, who is believed to have preached there between the years 52 and 70. The region then passed into the hands of the Dutch, who established themselves near Pulicat just north of the city in 1612. On 22 August 1639, the British East India Company was granted land by the Damerla Venkatadri, Nayak of Vandavasi, as a base for a permanent settlement, believed to be called Madrasemen. A year later, Fort St George was built, which subsequently became the nucleus around which the colonial city grew. In 1746, Fort St George and Madras were captured by the French under General La Bourdonnais, the Governor of Mauritius, who plundered the town and its outlying villages.

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Chennai is located at 13.04° N 80.17° E on the southeast coast of India and in the northeast corner of Tamil Nadu. It is located on a flat coastal plain known as the Eastern Coastal Plains. The city has an average elevation of 6 metres (20 feet), its highest point being 60 m (200 ft). Two rivers meander through Chennai, the Cooum River (or Koovam) in the central region and the Adyar River in the southern region. Both rivers are heavily polluted with effluents and trash from domestic and commercial sources. The Adyar, which is much less polluted than the Cooum, is de-silted and cleaned periodically by the state government. A protected estuary of the Adyar forms the natural habitat of several species of birds and animals. The Buckingham Canal, 4 km (3 miles) inland, travels parallel to the coast, linking the two rivers. The Otteri Nullah, an east-west stream runs through north Chennai and meets the Buckingham Canal at Basin Bridge. Several lakes of varying size are located on the western fringes of the city. Red Hills, Sholavaram and Chembarambakkam Lake supply Chennai with potable water. Groundwater sources are mostly brackish. The city's water supply has proved inadequate for its population, and an over-reliance on annual monsoon rains to replenish water reservoirs has compounded problems. There had been some attempts to pipe in water from other sources, such as the Veeranam, a water-rich place in Tamil Nadu or from the Krishna River in Andhra Pradesh. Water is a precious commodity in Chennai and this has given rise to private water tankers supplying many areas. Alternative measures such as reverse osmosis and rainwater harvesting have been taken up.

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Chennai has a diversified economic base. The main industries are automobile, software services, hardware manufacturing and financial services. Other important industries include petrochemicals, textiles and apparels. The Chennai Port and Ennore Port contribute greatly to its importance. The city has a fully computerised stock exchange called the Madras Stock Exchange. Chennai has the fourth largest GMP(Gross Metropolitan Product)in India. Since the late 1990s, software development and business process outsourcing and more recently manufacturing have emerged as major areas in the city's economy. Chennai has been rated as the most attractive Indian city for offshoring services according to A T Kearney's Indian City Services Attractiveness Index 2005. Software services giants like Infosys, TCS, Wipro,Cognizant Technology Solutions, Satyam, HCL, IBM, Accenture, Sun Microsystems, HP, EDS, CSC,and Verizon have development centres in the city. The city is now the second largest exporter of IT and IT enabled Services in the country second only to Bangalore. The IT Corridor, on Old Mahabalipuram Road in the southeast of the city houses several technology parks. The Mahindra World City, a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) with one of the world's largest information technology parks, is currently under construction in the outskirts of Chennai.Multinational corporations like Dell, Nokia, Motorola, Cisco, Samsung, Siemens, Flextronics and Foxconn have or are in the process of setting up Electronics / Hardware manufacturing plants in the Sriperumbudur electronics SEZ .

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