Abstract
During the 1620s and 1630s, the West Indies evolved from temporary bases for pirates into permanent colonies for planters. Seventeenth-century New England and the English West Indies developed in tandem as mutually sustaining parts of a common economic system. ‘West Indies and Carolina’ looks at the importance of this region in the story of colonial America. By producing sugar, the West Indies became the most valuable set of English colonies. Despite their small size, the islands of the West Indies received most of the English emigrants to the Americas. As the West Indies became crowded, the abundant lands of Carolina appealed to the crowded discontented white men of the West Indies, so they moved there.
