THE POLITICS OF EXPANSION THE CHOLA CONQUEST OF SRI LANKA AND SRI YUAYA GEORGE W. SPENCER L- | JAYALAKSHMI oes | aPC MADRS 00008 1 INDIA: " st south sae © coeorge W. Spencer, 1983 sine oe e we oye ie te | the ot 8 For ELAINE Published by. Srinivasan and N.S, Raghavan | fe dia Bra Patios, Pot Ba Nes 203, (sramalaiparam, { ‘Madras-600 028,Preface In 1967, T completed a Ph. D. dissertation in history a the University of California, Berkeley. It was eatitled “Royal Leader. ship and Imperial Conquest in Medieval South India: "The Naval Expedition of Rajendra Chola 1, c. 1025 A.D." and.it dealt with the circumstances leading up to the Chola raid agaiast the. South. cast Asian maritime state of Srivijaya, In the years following the completion of that study, I published numerous articles on various aspects of south Indian history in scholarly journals but made no attempt to tum the dissertation into a book. Still, as other Scholars working on the Chola period have published theic own: rasearch, my thesis has been referred to im several studies ia ‘ratifyingly flattering terms, so the fact that it bas not been available xcept through the facilities of University Microfilms has ‘become increasingly awkward. Ihave therefore availed myself of the very kind invitation from New Era Publications to transform the thesis into « book, The invitation provides me with an opportunity to address ‘once asain, with the aid of several yeas of additional research on the Chola period by myself and others, the central issues that Toonsidered in the original study, questions regarding the structure Of the state, the characteristics of royal leadership, and the significance of inscriptional conquest rhetoric, A discussion of ‘@hola conquests beyond the shores of India serves as. convenient organizing principe fora study seeking to address simultaneously sib of these related issues. The original study, like the present ‘book, war-not so much an analysis of military campaigns as an sktempt toillominate some basic features of the Chola state dating