The end of Dahomey's women soldiers is fixed with certainty: 4 November 1892, when they fought the French for the last time at the gates of Cana. Their beginning is not. Alpern observes that published guesses about the corps's founding stretch across more than two centuries, from the reign of Wegbaja to that of Glele.

Weighing the candidates, Alpern rules out both kings, while granting Wegbaja much the stronger claim. That claim rests on a tradition crediting him with the gbeto, a corps of elephant huntresses, together with the conjecture that this unit became the first body of women soldiers. Even the tradition wobbles: one version has him merely reorganizing huntresses who already existed, and another explanation holds simply that palace women supplied the king's table with game. Reports that he kept women as guards are unsourced or unprovable, and nobody has claimed he sent women into battle.

Bulfinch Lambe worked for the Royal African Company at its factory in Jakin, the port of Allada, until the king of Allada seized him in 1722 as security against an unpaid debt. When Agaja of Dahomey conquered Allada in 1724, Lambe passed into his hands and was carried inland to Abomey.

Agaja soon formed the idea, perhaps at Lambe's prompting, of negotiating a commercial agreement with the Company. Writing that November to Jeremiah Tinker, who governed the Company's factory in neighboring Whydah, Lambe reported the king's interest in establishing a correspondence and in having Europeans come to him, and offered himself as intermediary, which doubled as a route out of captivity. His release in 1726 came with the expectation that he would come back: Agaja told the trader William Snelgrave the following year that Lambe had sworn to return with a ship.

Law builds on Marion Johnson's earlier account of the episode in this journal.

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.

Dahomey's conquest of Whydah under King Agaja in March 1727 was unquestionably a major event. Dahomian tradition remembered it, with some simplification, as the moment the kingdom entered the Atlantic slave trade and as the high point of his reign, recalled in his surname Hunyito, taker of ships, and in the ship he took as an emblem.

Europeans on the scene were struck by it too, one eyewitness calling it a great revolution. Part of the impression came from the scale of destruction, described at the time as desolation by sword, fire, and famine visited on a country that had lately been populous and prosperous. The outcome had also been unforeseen: Bulfinch Lamb, an English trader held captive in Dahomey, had warned Agaja against attacking, arguing that Whydah's numbers and its imported European firearms made success unlikely.

Law introduces a neglected French account of the war, the Relation de la guerre de Juda by the Sieur Ringard of Nantes.

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.

The kingdom of Dahomey rose as slaving in its region grew, and the overlap has made it a standard case study of what the traffic did to African societies. Law reviews how historians have handled that story, trying to establish how the Dahomian state and its own slaving were actually connected.

One long-running view holds that Dahomey's rulers originally meant to bring the traffic to an end. Law considers that claim and refutes it. He turns instead to the kingdom's militaristic character, which is best understood, he suggests, as a consequence of warfare intensified by overseas demand for prisoners of war.

A third interpretation reads Dahomey's political centralization as a constructive answer to the disorder that raiding for captives brought with it. Law examines that position too, and endorses part of it.

A systematic description of Dahomean religion, arranged as its practitioners arrange it, by pantheon. Mawu heads the account as parent of the gods and the source of their power, the one who holds the formulae for making people and things and who sent divination down so that human beings might learn to deflect the anger of the ruling deities. The Sky pantheon is treated first, then the Earth pantheon, each with its priests, its initiates and its ceremonies.

Alongside the great gods stands the cult of the deified ancestors, built on the clan founders known as Tohwiyo and reaching into food prohibitions and the rites for the royal dead. A later section takes up magic and the semi-divine beings of the forest who connect it to the gods — Minona, the goddess of twins, the children said to be born to die and return. Serpent worship is examined and the charge of a phallic cult set aside.