This event takes place at the Institute of Historical Research and is sponsored by MMoR
Location: Institute of Historical Research and online
Speakers: Ana Lucia Araujo (Howard University) and Toby Green (KCL)
One of the most well-known West African states in the world, the Kingdom of Dahomey has been widely represented in novels, motion pictures, and television series over the past decades, and continues to fascinate popular audiences. Several scholars have published studies exploring the kingdom's history, but none of these histories are intended for general readers. My presentation draws on my book project Dahomey: The African Kingdom at the Centre of the World, a trade book drawing on archival research and fieldwork in Brazil, the Republic of Benin, Portugal, France, the United Kingdom and the United States, in which I seek to fill this gap. During the eighteenth century, Dahomey expanded its territory to the Atlantic Coast. Not only did the kingdom start to fully engage in the trade of human beings to the Americas, but also became increasingly involved, and sometimes defeated, in wars against its neighbors. In the first part of my presentation, I explore the history of human and material exchanges among Dahomey and other societies in West Africa, West Central Africa, Europe, and the Americas. I ask how Dahomey’s involvement in the tragic trade of enslaved Africans during its most intensive period gave birth to a global, cosmopolitan, and connected society whose peoples, artistic creations, languages, and religions, greatly contributed to the arts and cultures of Europe and the Americas. The second part of the presentation interrogates the problems created by the very process of writing such a difficult history. I ask how can we engage and reconcile acts of extreme violence such as warfare, human sacrifice, and enslavement with the beauty of artistic and cultural forms that emerged from these atrocities? How can we write such complex and complicated histories to larger audiences, while also correcting historically inaccurate European depictions of African societies such as Dahomey that have been portrayed as violent and barbaric in both historical accounts and popular representations? How can we avoid the simplistic dichotomy between victims and perpetrators, while underscoring the resilience and sovereignty of West African societies during the era of the Atlantic slave trade and European colonialism?
Ana Lucia Araujo is a social and cultural historian writing transnational and comparative history and a Full Professor of History at the historically black Howard University in Washington DC, United States and is currently the recipient of a 2025 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. Professor Araujo’s work explores the history of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade and their present-day legacies, including the long history of calls for reparations for slavery and colonialism, as well as the memory, heritage, material, and visual culture of slavery. Professor Araujo has published over fifteen books, including most recently, Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery in the Americas (University of Chicago Press, 2024) The Gift: How Objects of Prestige Shaped the Atlantic Slave Trade and Colonialism (Cambridge University Press, 2024), Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Transnational and Comparative History.
Toby Green is Professor of Precolonial and Lusophone African History and Culture at King’s College London. His recent books include his 2019 book A Fistful of Shells (awarded the British Academy’s Nayef Al-Rohdan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding) and The Heretic of Cacheu: Crispina Peres and the Struggle Over Life in Seventeenth-Century West Africa (2025). In his work on West Africa, he seeks actively to reorient the privileges of academic power through collaborating with colleagues in the "Global South".