Dahomey conquers Allada and Whydah on the Slave Coast
- Date
- 1724–1727
- Category
- Military & conflict
- Region
- Bight of Benin / Slave Coast (modern Benin)
- Era
- Early Modern
- Significance
Between 1724 and 1727 King Agaja of Dahomey conquered the coastal kingdoms of Allada and, on 26 February 1727, the great slaving port of Whydah, more than doubling his kingdom's territory and securing direct access to the Atlantic.
Whydah had been one of the busiest embarkation points on the Slave Coast, where European factories of several nations bought captives, and Agaja's campaigns initially disrupted the trade, burning forts and palaces and dispersing the merchant communities. Early reports that Dahomey sought to halt slaving outright proved overstated; by about 1730, squeezed between European demand and the pressure of the cavalry empire of Oyo to the north, to which Dahomey became tributary, Agaja and his successors reorganised the traffic as a tightly controlled royal monopoly. Dahomey thereafter became one of the most prolific suppliers of captives to the Atlantic trade, its powerful army, later including the famous female soldiers, conducting near-annual campaigns that fed the export markets at Whydah. The conquest reshaped the political geography of the Bight of Benin and exemplifies how the slave trade drove the formation of militarised, centralised African states organised around the capture and sale of human beings.
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Empires active in 1724–1727
- Spanish Empire1492 CE – 1976 CE
- Portuguese Empire1415 CE – 1999 CE
- Mughal Empire1526 CE – 1857 CE
- Qing Dynasty1636 CE – 1912 CE
- British Empire1583 CE – 1997 CE
- Russian Empire1721 CE – 1917 CE
Related military & conflict events
- Fall of Beijing and the Ming–Qing transition1644
- Defenestration of Prague and the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War23 May 1618
- Nadir Shah sacks Delhi and shatters Mughal powerMarch 1739
- Oman captures Fort Jesus and seizes the Swahili coast13 December 1698
- Qing conquest of the Dzungars and the creation of Xinjiang1755–1759
- Battle of Plassey and the rise of British power in Bengal23 June 1757
Further reading
The wider story
The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories of the African Middle Ages
Sets Kanem-Bornu within the wider medieval African world.
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