Sovereign’s Fort: Early British in India

The history of ‘proto-colonial' forts is often seen as either defensive establishment or as a scheme of the vailed offensive spearhead. But a global analogy of various ‘proto-colonial' fortified establishment will show that there was no unlined development or unbroken continuity. Based on the study of British fortifications in Bengal this article tries to argue that fortification had a tendency of turning into a sovereign entity by practicing a particular military-fiscal practice of protection and extraction. This tendency was developed slowly and influenced by adopting multiple events and short termed objectives. Even the native influences and parallel developments helped the structural as well as the abstract development of this fortification based sovereignty