ABSTRACT
The reviewer of a recent history of Dahomey complained that l’histoire-bataille played too large a part in the work. Before the general introduction of firearms into Yoruba warfare the primary armament of the soldiers consisted of swords, thrusting and throwing spears, and bows and arrows, including cross-bows, all of which continued to be used as supplementary to firearms up to the end of the nineteenth-century wars. Yet it is also true that war was often undertaken, at least before the nineteenth century, mainly as an annual or bi-annual exercise. As to the general effects of the wars, it seems likely that both in the nineteenth century and earlier economic and social dislocation was confined to the towns which were the main protagonists, and that the lives of the country people continued to follow the old patterns.
