Dahomey was one of the West African states whose political economy was transformed by the Atlantic slave trade. The book presents it both as a power involved in the wars and captive-taking that sustained slave exports and as a society that redirected enslaved labor into production within Africa when the trade was abolished. Its history illustrates how a change in export markets could alter the use of coercive labor without dismantling the institutions built around it.

State Power and the Slave Trade

Dahomey is named among the prominent West African states whose power grew in an era when laws and customs were distorted to capture and sell people. The trade could strengthen states organized around raiding and enslavement, even as its wider effects damaged political centralization elsewhere. In the book’s account, Dahomey belonged to this regional landscape of states whose political and economic life was closely connected to the slave trade.

The book also situates Dahomey within the commercial and political expansion of the early modern period. The Dutch East India Company’s campaigns in Southeast Asia show a broader pattern in which European commercial expansion imposed or reinforced extractive institutions, destroying or constraining local economic activity. The book links such expansion to the global spread of underdevelopment, though its account of Dahomey focuses more specifically on the persistence and redeployment of slavery in West Africa.

Labor After the Trade

The end of slave exports did not mean the end of slavery in Dahomey. As external demand for enslaved people fell, political elites could redirect enslaved labor toward production for the changing trade in commodities described as legitimate commerce. The book gives the clearest concrete example in Dahomey: the king maintained large palm-oil plantations near the coastal ports of Whydah and Porto Novo, worked by enslaved people.

This adaptation reveals a distinction between ending a commercial route and ending the coercive system behind it. In the book’s account, the abolition of the slave trade shifted the location and purpose of forced labor rather than causing slavery in Africa to wither away. Existing political institutions and patterns of behavior persisted, allowing enslavement to continue within African economies even as the market for exports to the Americas contracted.

Persistence and Significance

The book characterizes slavery as expanding rather than contracting in nineteenth-century Africa, while acknowledging that reliable figures are difficult to obtain. Accounts by travelers and merchants suggest that well over half the population in Dahomey, Asante, and the Yoruba city-states were enslaved. This estimate is presented as evidence from contemporary accounts, not as a precise census of Dahomey.

Dahomey’s plantations near Whydah and Porto Novo therefore stand as a specific instance of a wider regional pattern: coercive institutions adapted to new commodity markets and survived the formal ending of the Atlantic trade. The book connects the persistence of such institutions to the failure of industrialization to spread through much of sub-Saharan Africa, where economies stagnated or experienced economic retardation while other parts of the world transformed.