The Danish West Indies - Under Company Rule (1671-1754); With a Supplementary Chapter, 1755-1917 #222493

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.