Agaja, was told by Agaja earlier that because he had saved Dahomey from the Oyo Empire he was going to be the king rather than any of his older brothers, although that tradition may have been created by Tegbessou to legitimize his rule. Regardless, the result was a contest between him and his brothers upon Agaja's death. In the end, Tegbessou was victorious and became the new king of Dahomey. Agaja and the slave trade Agaja's motivations for taking over Allada and Whydah and his involvement in the slave trade have been a topic for debate among historians. The debate centers largely around Agaja's conquest of Allada and Whydah and an observed decrease in the slave trade in the area after this conquest. Complicating attempts to discern motivation is that Agaja's administration ended by creating a significant infrastructure for the slave trade and participated actively in it during the last few years of his reign. The debate over Agaja's motivations goes back to John Atkins' 1735 publication of A Voyage to Guinea, Brazil, and the West Indies. In that book, Atkins argued that Allada and Whydah were known for regular slave raiding on the Abomey plateau and that Agaja's attacks on those kingdoms were primarily to release some of his people who had been captured. A key piece of evidence for Atkins was a letter purported to be from Agaja and carried by Bulfinch Lambe to England in 1731 which expressed the willingness of Agaja to establish agricultural exports to Great Britain as an alternative to the slave trade. The authenticity of this letter is disputed and it was widely used in abolition debates in Great Britain as a letter by a purported indigenous African abolitionist. Later historians have continued this debate about the role of Agaja in the slave trade, but with the need to account for the fact that in the last years of Agaja's life (and after Atkins' book was published) the Kingdom of Dahomey was a major participant in the Atlantic slave trade. Robert W. Harms writes that Agaja's participation in the slave trade was a self-perpetuated necessity. Agaja had increasingly made his kingdom more and more dependent on foreign wares that could only be paid for by slaves. He writes: Basil Davidson contended that Dahomey was drawn into the slave trade only as a means of self-defense against slave raiding by the Oyo Empire and