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.

Law takes up a gap in the study of Christian missions in West Africa: the seventeenth-century Catholic efforts in Allada and Whydah, kingdoms on the Bight of Benin that Dahomey absorbed in the 1720s. Despite abundant printed documentation, no detailed study had been attempted, and general surveys handle the episode briefly and not always accurately.

Two things are done here. The first is narrative -- a fuller reconstruction of missionary enterprise from early Portuguese contact through the Dahomian conquests. The second is explanatory, asking why Africans responded to evangelisation as they did.

Kings, Law finds, were consistently more open to baptism than their chiefs, and he reads this politically. Royal authority was checked in practice by provincial governors and by the priesthoods of the local vodun; raising up a supreme god mirrored, and could serve, an expansion of the king's power. Whydah's rulers were meanwhile quarrelling openly with the python cult over offerings and attendance.