Two and a half centuries of writing about how Dahomey rose on the Slave Coast come under review here, from Snelgrave and Atkins in the 1730s through Dalzel to Polanyi and Akinjogbin. Law shows how each generation's portrait served an argument about the slave trade: Snelgrave's cycle of war, captivity and sacrifice justified buying captives who would otherwise be killed, while abolitionists replied that European demand had militarised African societies in the first place. On Agaja's conquest of Allada and Whydah in the 1720s, Law finds the contemporary evidence, including Agaja's own reported words, points to a wish for direct access to European trade and firearms, and gives little support to readings of him as an enemy of the traffic. He also questions claims that Dahomey was a wholly new kind of state, since succession rules, royal inheritance and levies of girls all had precedents in the coastal kingdoms.