Limit search to available items
Book Cover
E-book
Author Monroe, J. Cameron, author

Title The pre-colonial state in West Africa : building power in Dahomey / J. Cameron Monroe, University of California, Santa Cruz
Published New York NY : Cambridge University Press, 2014

Copies

Description 1 online resource
Contents Introduction -- Geography, settlement, and politics on the Slave Coast -- Dahomey and the Atlantic world : the royal palace sphere -- Capturing the countryside -- The city as history -- Power by design -- Building Dahomey
Summary This volume incorporates historical, ethnographic, art historical, and archaeological sources to examine the relationship between the production of space and political order in the West African Kingdom of Dahomey during the tumultuous Atlantic Era. Dahomey, situated in the modern Republic of Bénin, emerged in this period as one of the principal agents in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and an exemplar of West African state formation. Drawing from eight years of ethnohistorical and archaeological fieldwork in the Republic of Bénin, the central thesis of this volume is that Dahomean kings used spatial tactics to project power and mitigate dissent across their territories. J. Cameron Monroe argues that these tactics enabled kings to economically exploit their subjects and to promote a sense of the historical and natural inevitability of royal power
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Print version record
Subject Political culture -- Benin -- History
Power (Social sciences) -- Benin -- History
Architecture -- Political aspects -- Benin
HISTORY -- Africa -- West.
Architecture -- Political aspects
Political culture
Power (Social sciences)
SUBJECT Benin -- History -- To 1894. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85013180
Subject Benin
Genre/Form History
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9781139957861
1139957864
9781139628709
1139628704