Tracing where Dahomey got the captives it sold between roughly 1715 and 1850, Law separates two supplies that earlier accounts tended to merge: prisoners taken by the kingdom's own campaigns, whose disposal the king controlled, and slaves bought from interior markets and passed on at the coast. Against Polanyi's picture of a single state monopoly, and revising his own earlier article, he describes a merchant sector working alongside the royal trade, its members holding official rank while trading on their own capital, so that the line between state agent and private dealer was never clean. Warriors and traders needed each other and obstructed each other, since the wars that produced captives also cut the routes that carried them. An epilogue follows the same merchants into palm oil, where plantations near Whydah built fortunes that the annual campaign, timed against the harvest, kept eroding.