Excerpt from The Danish West Indies: Under Company Rule (1671-1754); With a Supplementary Chapter, 1755-1917 Since the opening of the Panama Canal, the attention of the United States has been drawn more and more to those Caribbean and Gulf regions, which were, until comparatively recent times, the economic center of the New World and the source of a considerable part of that wealth which kept the wheels of industry running in the Old. If Tobacco was King in the seventeenth, and Cotton in the nineteenth, then Sugar surely held the scepter in the eighteenth century. This book was written before the United States began the negotiations that have resulted in the transfer of the Danish West Indian islands to the United States. The increased interest of Americans in Caribbean lands, and the scarcity of authoritative historical books upon the subject will it is hoped justify its appearance now. It assumes a certain curiosity on the part of the reader, first, as to how the Danish-Norwegian state became interested in the islands off the Spanish Main, and second, how so small a state has managed to retain its hold for nearly two centuries and a half. The pages which follow record ail episode in the time when Sugar was King. They are the result of an attempt to identify and appraise a number of official and other papers found in the Bancroft Collection at the University of California. These documents had come from the Danish West Indian islands, and were first brought to the writer's attention by Professor Henry Morse Stephens under whose inspiration and guidance the subsequent investigations were carried on. The paucity of the printed material dealing with the history of Danish colonization in America led to a search in the Danish libraries and archives for further light: The entire archives of the Danish West India and Guinea Company were found substantially intact in their repository in the state archives building of Denmark near Christiansborg castle. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.