Law returns to a subject he treated in the same journal in 1977, extending and correcting that earlier account of how slaves reached the Atlantic trade from Dahomey.

Two questions organize it: how much came from local raiding rather than purchase from the interior, and how a group of private merchants emerged. Dahomey's kings first ran the trade as a royal monopoly fed entirely by raiding. From the middle of the eighteenth century the kingdom took up a middleman role, buying from the interior, and because the kings generally left that side alone a private sector formed.

Merchants began as state officials licensed to trade for the king or for chiefs, then won the right to do business for themselves as well. The shift from slaves to palm oil in the nineteenth century made them wealthier and more autonomous, and sharpened recurring conflicts with the monarchy over commercial policy and its seizures, divisions that weakened Dahomey against European imperialism.