Dahomey is unusually well documented, and Law sets out both its chronology and the materials historians work from. Probably founded in the seventeenth century, the Fon kingdom became a regional power under Agaja, whose conquests of Allada in 1724 and Whydah in 1727 brought it into direct dealings with European slave traders. It stayed dominant until the French conquest of 1892–94, and the monarchy ended when the last king was deposed in 1900; ritual at the Abomey palace, now a museum, kept some institutional thread alive.

Two bodies of evidence anchor the record. European writing from the 1720s onward is unusually full, including a history Archibald Dalzel printed in 1793. Beside it sits a rich oral tradition, known best through the recension Le Herissé published in 1911 — which, Law notes, translates and partly abridges testimony from one informant: Agbidinukun, who administered a district under French rule and was brother to Behanzin, the kingdom's last independent ruler.