Pepper Lands

This chapter looks at the pepper-producing lands in ancient India. Broadly speaking, from Antiquity up to the Early Modern Age, South India was the only source of black pepper exported to the west. However, within South India, the precise geographical loci of pepper appear to have been subject to local intraregional shifts over time. Specifically, a first shift occurred during the transition to Late Antiquity, when the pepper trade centres moved from Muziris up to the Mangalore region. In the transition to the Late Middle Ages and then to Early Modernity, the focus of the pepper trade shifted again, but this time in the opposite direction, from Mangalore down to Calicut, and then from Calicut down to Cochin. Although geographically close, these South Indian sub-regions achieved differing levels of pepper productivity in the Early Modern period. It is not clear whether the shifts were also sensitive to the vagaries of local politics, but whatever the local dynamics, they certainly mirror the shifting balance between the two macro regions that were the primary consumers of South Indian pepper: west Asia and the Mediterranean regions on one side, and the Bay of Bengal and China on the other.