History of Spices 02 - Black Pepper

Black pepper (pipper nigrum) one of the earliest spices traded in the world. Pepper was an important spice traded in between Orient and Europe. Pepper’s medical use in India date back at least 3000 years.

This is a perennial climbing vine from family piperaceae and it may reach 10 meters in height and is native to Malabar coast of India. The fruit is a drupe and when it matures the colour becomes dark red. Black pepper is obtained from the small dried berries (peppercorns) of the vine Piper nigrum (also white pepper is obtained from the same way but the processing is different.) The name pepper is derived from the Sanskrit name of long pepper, pippali. That word gave rise to the Greek peperi and Latin piper.

While there are records of black pepper in ancient Greek and Roman texts, the spice was largely popularized in the late 15th century, after a discovery by the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama on the shores of Calicut (present day Kozhikode), India—the spice was so abundant, it ultimately led to Portuguese domination. Vasco de gama’s discovery of sea route to the spice lands, Malabar in 1498 resulted two things. The first thing is it resulted a secure monopoly to the Portugal over spice trade. Secondly it destroyed economies of Alexandria and other western ports those were built on the fortune of spice trade. And made Lisbon the richest European port for almost two centuries.

Then from 1595 to 1650 Dutch took over with results of their voyages to Indonesia. They had their victorious time at spice trade till pepper cultivation spread in to Malay Archipelago. Then with reign of british empire the East Indian Trading Company made London the spice centre of the world through pepper trade and because of high production the pepper prices became affordable for almost all people. With that the luxury of pepper was ended and started becoming one of the most used spices even for today.

In 1997 – 2002 world pepper production raised to 341000 Metric tons. At the present-day Vietnam holds the fame for the largest pepper producer contributing about 35% of the world pepper production followed by Indonesia, India, Brazil and China.