Chilli peppers are eaten as a spice and as a condiment by more than one-quarter of the earth’s inhabitants each day. Many more eat them with varying regularity – and the rate of consumption is growing. Although the chilli pepper is the most used spice and condiment in the world, its monetary value in the spice trade is not indicative of this importance because it is readily cultivated by many of its consumers.

Peppers are the fruit of perennial shrubs belonging to the genus Capsicum and were unknown outside the tropical and subtropical regions of the Western Hemisphere before 1492, when Christopher Columbus made his epic voyage in search of a short route to the East Indies. Although he did not reach Asia and its spices, he did return to Spain with examples of a new, pungent spice found during his first visit to the eastern coast of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola (now the Dominican Republic and Republic of Haiti). Today capsicums are not only consumed as a spice, condiment, and vegetable, but are also used in medicines, as coloring agents, for landscape and decorative design, and as ornamental objects.

History

For the peoples of the Old World, the history of capsicums began at the end of the fifteenth century, when Columbus brought some specimens of a redfruited plant from the New World back to his sovereigns (Morison 1963: 216; Anghiera 1964: 225). However, the fruits were not new to humankind. When nonagricultural Mongoloid peoples, who had begun migrating across the Bering Strait during the last Ice Age, reached the subtropical and tropical zones of their new world, they found capsicums that had already become rather widespread. They had been carried to other regions by natural dispersal agents – principally birds – from their nuclear area south of both the wet forests of Amazonia and the semiarid cerado of central Brazil (Pickersgill 1984: 110). Plant remains and depictions of chillies on artifacts provide archaeological evidence of the use and probable cultivation of these wild capsicums by humans as early as 5000 B.C. By 1492, Native Americans had domesticated (genetically altered) at least four species (Mac- Neish 1967; Heiser 1976: 266; Pickersgill 1984: 113). No others have subsequently been domesticated.