Kingdom of Dahomey

A West African kingdom that built a centralised state on the slave trade and fielded an army corps of women. Dahomey emerged on the Abomey plateau in the seventeenth century and expanded to the coast, taking Ouidah in 1727 and becoming one of the principal suppliers of captives to European ships - the kings ran the trade as a royal monopoly, and the wars that produced captives were state policy rather than incidental. The administration was unusually centralised for the region, with appointed officials rather than hereditary chiefs, an annual census, and a system in which every male official had a female counterpart at court who kept parallel records. The ahosi, women soldiers Europeans called Amazons, numbered several thousand at their height and were the kingdom's elite troops. Annual customs ceremonies included human sacrifice of war captives, which European accounts emphasised and which was real. When the Atlantic trade closed, Dahomey shifted to palm oil produced by the people it would previously have sold. France conquered the kingdom in 1892 and 1894. The royal palaces at Abomey are a World Heritage site. The kingdom covered part of what is now southern Benin and lasted from about 1600 to 1894. Abomey was the capital and each king added a palace rather than reusing his predecessor's. The bas-reliefs on those walls record the kingdom's own version of its wars. Vodun was the state religion of the kingdom and remains widely practised in the region. France returned twenty-six looted royal objects in 2021, after decades of Beninese requests.

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