The kingdom of Allada dominated slave exports from the western Bight of Benin before Dahomey's conquests of the 1720s, yet its earliest phase has been treated thinly or misleadingly in the standard accounts. Law reworks the numbers, discarding decade-by-decade tabulation in favour of a periodisation drawn from the trade's own political history.

Two corrections follow. Portuguese activity in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, judged negligible by earlier scholars, looks larger once the fiscal basis of the surviving valuations is read correctly; the mid-century Dutch and English trade, by contrast, looks smaller. Sustained growth begins only in the later 1670s.

Law also stresses how violently the traffic fluctuated year to year, disrupted by the Anglo-Dutch wars. That matters for interpretation: falling slave prices between the 1650s and 1670s accompanied stagnation rather than the expanding African supply earlier explanations assumed.