Ouidah: The Social History of a West African Slaving Port, 1727-1892

Robin Law is a historian of West Africa, and this Ohio University Press book is his standard scholarly history of Ouidah, the West African port through which a substantial share of the Atlantic slave trade passed, covering both its role in that trade and its vodun shrines and religious life. Its strength is that Law worked from local Ouidah records and oral tradition alongside European colonial and trading archives, rather than relying on the European side of the record alone, giving a fuller account of the port's own religious institutions and how they related to its commercial history. Its limit is that it centers on Ouidah specifically across this period, so a claim about vodun practice elsewhere in West Africa, outside this one port city, needs a source with that broader geographic scope.