Ṣàwárí

How Ọ̀yọ́ rose to dominate the western Yoruba region and beyond, the constitutional machinery that constrained its king, the cavalry that made it work, and why both eventually failed.

Yorùbá arms and fortification from iron-age edged weapons and Ọ̀yọ́'s cavalry economy through the nineteenth-century transition to imported firearms, and the archaeological evidence for defensive earthworks going back centuries before European contact.

The political reign, commercial policies, military decline, and constitutional conflicts of Aláàfin Abíọ́dún, the late eighteenth-century monarch of the Ọ̀yọ́ Empire.