Elections

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Elections

• Have you registered to vote?
• Deadline is October 12th
• November 2nd is general elections

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Bell Peppers

• The Story of Bell Peppers
• An Exploration into
• Historical Economic Geography
• Will this capture the interest of my GEOG 106
  students?

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A few facts

• The botanical name is capsicum
• Native to Central and South America
• May have originated in Bolivia
• Currently grown in many tropical countries as
  well as in the more temperate climates of the
  Southwest United States and in the Mediterranean
  area.
• The original name is chili
• Said to be derived from a Nahuatl word, tchili,
  meaning red
• The name Chile, the country, is derived from a
  word meaning snow

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Chile or Pepper?

• Notice that the name for the plant in the
  original areas was NOT PEPPER!
• But chili
• So, why did this crop, which had a unique
  geography (South America) get a name change to
  pepper?
• Bell pepper
• Jalapeño pepper

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Pepper

• The original pepper
• Now referred to as black pepper
• Botanically piper nigrum
• Pepper comes from the sanskrit word pippali,
  which refers to the berry
• Indigenous to the west coast of India
• Was a highly prized commodity
• So highly that it was on par with gold, and was
  referred to as black gold
• In 410 AD the Visigoths demanded 3,000 pounds of
  pepper as ransom when they sacked Rome
• In the middle ages, Arabian and Venetian traders
  made fortunes by controlling trade in pepper

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The Renaissance

• So, instead of the land route, Europeansprimarily
  the Portugese, Spaniards, and Italianswanted to
  sail ships to India to get the pepper
• Remember, pepper was literally worth its weight
  in gold
• With maritime explorations, the race started to
  figure out the shortest sea route from Europe to
  the land of black gold (India)
• In 1498 Vasco da Gama was the first to reach
  India
• Reached Kozhikode (Calicut) on the west coast

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Da Gamas Route
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Kerala
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So, bell pepper?

• Christopher Columbus set out to India in 1492
• Ended up in the West Indies, which he thought was
  India
• He thought that the chili with the seeds inside
  was a variation of pepper
• Took these chilies back to Iberia and told the
  king he brought pepper with him
• Europeans liked this new pepper
• Thanks to Columbus for lots of confusions
• Thinking this land is India and the people as
  Indians
• Calling chili a pepper so much so that we now
  have to refer to the original pepper as black
  pepper

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Economic Geographyof pepper

• Notice the interplay between economics and
  geography
• Commodity is geography-specific
• Pepper in India
• Chili in South America
• Value of the commodity
• Trade involved
• Money to be made
• Find better access to the commodity
• Navigate a new path to India
• Better yet, build the Suez Canal!

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In this course

• We will look at the interplay between economics
  and geography
• In order to do this
• How do we understand the world?
• Where did all these people come from?
• How do all these people create wealth?
• Where do we live in order to create wealth?
• Are we affecting the natural environment around
  us?