curred (Williams, 2002).
Before 1640, Benin was centrally governed by its king with the assistance of a royally appointed administration. Difficulties in the succession, coupled with changing trading pattern allowed the administration to gain some independence and even challenge the kings, taking away some of their power. Toward the end of the seventeenth century, a number of European observers noted that the Edo Kingdom of Benin had been racked for some years by civil war (Girshick & Thornton, 2002). The ultimate impact of this civil war was to match different levels of the administration and the kings against each other, transforming Benin from a centrally governed to a more collectively governed kingdom. Independence did not last for many years after the "European" encounter.
Trading in slaves for European weapons and other goods helped the kingdom to become one of the richest and most powerful kingdoms in Africa û a situation that lasted until 1892 when the French created a pretext to gather an army at the coast and marched on Abomey. A series of fierce battles ensued until the Dahomey Kingdom fell to the French (Williams, 2002). Since then, Benin has experienced both colonial rule and independence.
Dossou-Yovo (1999) states that in the colonial period, Dahomey received little attention from the French authorities. Its contribution to the wider French empire, however, was substantial. For example, Dahomey was a source of administrators for wide areas of former French West Africa. Human rather than economic capital appears, with the abolition of slavery, to have been the primary resource of this country. Prior to independence, Dahomey had few known economic resources and there were intense rivalries among individuals and between different sections of the local middle class.
Dossou-Yovo (1999, p. 59) maintains that "before independence, these had merged into a coalition grouping, the 'P...