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This chapter explores how Dahomey did not really manage to stabilize the situation and especially failed to conquer new regions, a negative mark for a warrior state whose raison d’être was precisely conquest. The slave trade declined, due in part to the counterproductive regulations imposed by the new authorities. The Dahomeans were faced with competition from a new quarter: the slow rise of the slave ports of the Eastern Slave Coast, a region which Oyo began to divert its slave trade to. The story of the Dutchman Hendrik Hertogh, in the middle of it all, is detailed. Hertogh managed to erect a considerable informal (and anti-Dahomean) polity in the east, until 1738, when he was assassinated. The beginnings of the Annual Customs in Dahomey is also noted, notorious for human sacrifices on a huge scale, formally in honor of the ancestors. Human sacrifices became an integral part of Dahomean customs.

This chapter lays out the organizing principle of slave culture in North America and underscores the centrality of the ancestral past to the African in America. The most important African ritual in slavery, the Ring Shout, is revealed in some detail. With the ring a symbol of unity and counter-clockwise dance and rhythm consciousness as common starting points, different ethnic groups on plantations of the South began moving toward unity almost before being aware of it. Children were especially drawn to the ring, helping to transmit the Shout over generations. African practices and values are related to specific academic disciplines to make slave behavior comprehensible. Slave art in the form of tales, music and dance are in dispensable to the analysis that establishes far more similarities between slave culture in the North and south than previously thought.

From 1724, dramatic changes took place on the Slave Coast, with the Dahomean conquests of Allada (1724–6) and Hueda/ Ouidah-Glehue in 1727-30/33. It was, all told, a tremendously bloody affair. But those conquests did not go unchallenged; they provoked the intervention of the mighty northern (and Yoruba) polity of Oyo – not quite a newcomer on the local scene, since Oyo had since exported a considerable number of slaves through the Slave Coast. The redoubtable cavalry of Oyo inflicted an apparently shattering defeat on Dahomey in April 1726. Oyo had defeated Dahomey several times but was never able to conquer that polity, and the Dahomeans emerged apparently unscathed each time from the assaults of Oyo. Dahomey had, however, to become a vassal of Oyo and to pay a heavy tribute. Dahomey had also to face slightly later the surprisingly tough resistance of the exiled Huedans who had found refuge in the west. For the Europeans it was a dangerous time; those who opted for what turned out to be the “wrong” side at a particular moment, paid for this error with their lives.

Tegbesu, king of Dahomey (1740–74), found himself at the helm of a polity on the brink of implosion and was also faced with formidable external foes. He managed to wade through by accentuating the regime of terror, possibly establishing something akin to a “totalitarian” state, complete with internal purges. Dahomey’s enemies (Oyo, the exiled Huedans, Glidji etc.) were unable to coordinate their efforts. The relationship with (and between) the Europeans remained strained, provoking their slow disentanglement. But Tegbesu did try to mend his relations with the Portuguese-Brazilians, even sending the first of what turned out to be many Dahomean embassies to the viceroy in Brazil.