• Hi Guest!

    The costs of running this forum are covered by Sea Lion Press. If you'd like to help support the company and the forum, visit patreon.com/sealionpress

Thoughts on Dahomey - 3

Dunno who found the pictures for this out of @Meadow or @AndyC but thanks to both of you, regardless. This set of three are the first, but hopefully not only, articles I've written for this site and I'm delighted that you put them up and that I've had such intelligent comments on them.

Those of you who read my vignette for the revolution contest might recognise a lot of the thinking in this article.
 
Dunno who found the pictures for this out of @Meadow or @AndyC but thanks to both of you, regardless. This set of three are the first, but hopefully not only, articles I've written for this site and I'm delighted that you put them up and that I've had such intelligent comments on them.

Those of you who read my vignette for the revolution contest might recognise a lot of the thinking in this article.
It was Andy, he's done almost all the work on these in advance, I'm just posting them while he's away. There's a couple I need to finish up later in his break.
 
There's some fascinating thoughts to be had there long term- how many of the things which currently are seen as Dahomey's more interesting/modern ideas would just get outright rejected by an evolving state.

It's a great counter to the Whiggish 'continuous progress' concept.
 
There's some fascinating thoughts to be had there long term- how many of the things which currently are seen as Dahomey's more interesting/modern ideas would just get outright rejected by an evolving state.

It's a great counter to the Whiggish 'continuous progress' concept.

One of the things I've tried to get across was the way in which, like everything, it's more complicated than it might seen at first glance.

So Dahomey went from having an absolute Monarch to one where non royals were powerful enough to stand their ground and this also came hand in hand with low born peasants having less routes to the top due to an entrenched nobility reducing opportunities for social advancement.

So Dahomey introduced the world's only ever units of all female front line fighters but that came alongside a loss of power of women in general as it was part of them being forced into more subservient roles such as soldier rather than prime minister.

So Dahomey was encouraged by abolitionist Europeans to move to a palm oil economy to provide an alternative way of making money that wasn't selling slaves but the palm oil was only profitable when produced by slave labour on plantations.

One of the little tragedies of pre colonial history in general is the way the country at the moment of it's death, in this case 1894, becomes the country as it is known for rather than merely the point in it's evolution where things stopped. A Dahomey that survived couldn't be the Dahomey in 1894. Beyond the fact that no country is static, Dahomey was a very different place in 1794, I think by that point the cracks in the system are showing to such an extent that there's either major reform or a revolution.

We talked in the last article about how it's reasonably possible from that point in 1894 for Dahomey to become either incredibly ahead of the times in terms of women's rights or tragically regressive depending on the decisions made and I agree. It was the country which both had a tradition of female government and state funded sex slaves, it was a toss up.

It's kind of where I am with a lot of this. It could reform in ways we'd think of as positive or it could not. We never got to find out in OTL because the French stepped in.
 
Back
Top