From Defended Settlements to Fortified Strongholds: Responses to Gunpowder in the Early Modern Deccan

Abstract

Architectural responses to improved gunpowder technologies reached a conclusion in the sixteenth-century Deccan. Instead of constructing heavier defences, most urban settlements were disaggregated into military and administrative strongholds vis-à-vis civilian and mercantile cities by the seventeenth century. Changing economic and social conditions allowed for this separation of urban functions. The response to military revolutions was therefore not at the scale of individual buildings, but instead reconfigured the pattern of settlements in the region.