Power by design

Abstract

This article examines the role of royal architectural design in strategies to promote political order in the Kingdom of Dahomey, a major West African state which emerged in the era of the transAtlantic slave trade. Historical and ethnographic sources are marshaled to identify an underlying normative architectural tradition in Dahomean palace construction, a tradition defined by distinct zones devoted to public ritual and semi-public political negotiations. Analysis of the ground plans of six royal palace complexes from the precolonial city of Cana is then deployed to trace the evolution of the latter zone over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Qualitative and quantitative analysis of spatial patterns reveals an overall rise in the spatial complexity of, as well as a radical expansion in the control of movement through, royal palace complexes over time. This pattern, I argue, was part of broader material attempts to promulgate a sense of social and political order in a period defined by turbulence and unpredictability.