The profits of pepper. Indian Ocean trade and the economy of Kerala, 800–1600

This study analyses the records in the Cairo geniza, the distribution of Chinese ceramics, the reports of travellers (this is the best-known, but least important, dataset), and the discussions of the Portuguese regarding how best to exploit pepper in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This is then set against what evidence there is from Kerala itself. It emerges that, despite the importance of pepper to the trading systems of the medieval period, the impact of that trade on Kerala was of relatively small importance. The Kerala economy was based on rice, and it remained so. The article therefore contributes to the growing historiography which stresses internal regional economies rather than external trading as the best guide for understanding pre-modern development, as opposed to world-systems theories, but it also aims to show in detail why it was that the pepper trade had relatively little impact on its producer region. Kerala was the only source of pepper for the whole Eurasian world until the late Middle Ages. This article argues that, despite the importance of pepper to the trading systems of the medieval period, the impact of that trade on Kerala was of relatively small importance, and discusses why.