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STANLEY B. ALPERN, Amazons of Black Sparta: the women warriors of Dahomey. London: Hoist; New York: New York University Press, 1998, 292 pp., L35.00, ISBN 1 85065 361 5 hard covers, L12.95, ISBN 1 85065 363 3 paperback. The kingdom of Dahomey, in the modern Republic of Benin, was notorious in the nineteenth century for its employment of female soldiers, not only as a royal bodyguard but also as a major element in its fighting forces. This book is a meticulously researched, but analytically unadventurous, account of these Dahomian `Amazons'. It is based on a virtually exhaustive survey of published material, both primary sources and secondary literature, supplemented by some limited work in French and British archives, but seemingly no fieldwork conducted in Dahomey itself. In twenty-one mostly brief chapters it deals with the origins and development of this female army, its organisation, recruitment and training, its accommodation, clothing and weaponry, the economic activities which supported it, and the major campaigns in which it fought. But the more general issues which the phenomenon of the Dahomian `Amazons' raises, with regard to the role of women in Dahomian society and the Dahomian political structure, and more particularly within the royal palace, are not pursued very far; little sense is conveyed of whether (or how far) female military service, and the more general use of palace women as agents of royal authority, in Dahomey should be seen as empowering women, rather than as representing only a particular form of male exploitation of female labour. Although the detailed scholarship is impressive, it is sometimes inconclusive, citing contradictory evidence and interpretations with no attempt to resolve the issue. It also seems occasionally a little uncritical, being more concerned to accumulate detailed evidence than to evaluate it, and sometimes treating contemporary accounts which merely repeated information from earlier sources as independent corroboration of them. Nor is it entirely clear how the book is intended to relate to the earlier historiography on the subject. The Dahomian `Amazons' have been the subject of one earlier book, by Helene d'Almeida-Topor ( 1984), as well as of an excellent undergraduate dissertation for the National University of Benin, based on extensive local fieldwork, by Amelie Degbelo (1979), while the role of women in the royal palace of Dahomey more generally was treated in a Ph.D. thesis by Eddy Bay (1977). Alpern, whose grasp of the literature is commendably comprehensive, cites all these works (though he was unable to take account of Eddy Bay's excellent Wives of the Leopard, published only after Alpern had gone to press). But although he occasionally takes issue with these earlier authors on points of detail, he offers no explanation of how the argument of his book is meant to relate to theirs. The only clue is provided by the publisher's back-cover `blurb', which claims that Alpern's is the first detailed account of the Dahomian Amazons, `apart from a few specialized academic works'. The implicit claim that this is a work of popularisation, however, is somewhat at odds with its conventional apparatus of scholarship (with over 1,000 end notes). Its principal strength, indeed, is precisely its density of documentation, especially its comprehensive gleaning of material from contemporary European accounts. If it offers more of the raw material for historical interpretation than of the finished product, it will certainly be invaluable to future scholars in the former respect.