History of the Kingdom of Dahomey History of the Kingdom of Dahomey The History of the Kingdom of Dahomey spans 300 years from around 1600 until 1904 with the rise of the Kingdom of Dahomey as a major power on the Atlantic coast of modern-day Benin until French conquest. The kingdom became a major regional power in the 1720s when it conquered the coastal kingdoms of Allada and Whydah. With control over these key coastal cities, Dahomey became a major center in the Atlantic Slave Trade until 1852 when the British imposed a naval blockade to stop the trade. War with the French began in 1892
History of the Kingdom of Dahomey slave traders and the conclusions were that the slave trade was a process of freeing the population from the highly militarized, very brutal, and despotic Kingdom of Dahomey. William Snelgrave and Archibald Dalzel wrote key histories and memoirs of Dahomey presenting the case for the slave trade to save the population from human sacrifice. Abolitionist historians, in contrast, argued that the brutality of the Dahomey state was the result of the slave trade itself. Dahomey was thus portrayed with a host of very negative stereotypes, with significant exaggeration, by European historians in the 18th and 19th century. With increasing debates