INDIES, THE, the Commonwealth's sugar provinces of the Caribbean sea, the greater part taken from Spain with Jamaica (q.v.) in 1655 and held since as the single most valuable dominion, acre for acre, that the Commonwealth possesses. The returns for 1836, the last full year before the Act of General Emancipation (q.v.), record a chattel population of some three hundred and forty thousand set against a free population, of every complexion, of under thirty thousand — a ratio of above eleven to one that this contributor has found nowhere else repeated in the Commonwealth's dominions, and one that made the sugar islands, by any measure of capital concentration this contributor's own training supplies, the single richest concentration of chattel property the Agrarian Law (q.v.) had ever left untouched: a planter of middling consequence in Jamaica or Barbadoes commanded, in bondsmen alone, a fortune the English Agrarian ceiling would have forbidden him to hold in a single acre of Kentish land.
It was this concentration, rather than any want of loyalty to the Frame itself, that carried the greater part of the Indies into the Act of Severance (q.v.) of 1837: the planting interest of the islands, unlike the yeoman farmers of the Chesapeake tidewater, had almost nothing invested in land that the Reunion (q.v.) could restore to them and everything invested in a form of property the Act of Emancipation had already, in principle, extinguished. The naval reconquest that followed — the islands blockaded within the year and retaken, in the main, without the protracted land campaigns the mainland required — reflects, on this contributor's reading of the returns, less a military distinction between the two theatres than an economic one: an island planting family, cut off by the Commonwealth's own fleet from the provisions its sugar monoculture had never troubled to grow for itself, had rather less capacity to hold out than a Carolina rice planter sitting on his own tidewater granary.
The sugar economy has recovered its prewar output, on the Sugar Trade (q.v.) returns this contributor has consulted for the present decade, though the free wage labour that now works the estates costs the planting interest, by its own repeated complaint to the Committee of the Plantations, rather more than the chattel labour it replaced ever appeared to on the estate's own books — an appearance this contributor's colleagues in the economic history of the Agrarian's own working have generally found the single most instructive statistic the whole Severance produced, though it is not always the one the Commonwealth's schoolbooks trouble to print beside the casualty returns. (M. S. W.)