Srinagar, April 11 -- When read through the lens of material culture, history often discloses that seemingly inconsiderable objects possess elephantine structural power.

Among such objects stands black pepper (Piper nigrum), indigenous to the Malabar Coast.

It emerges as an active historical agent, a commodity with force and consequence, and pierced economic systems, reoriented trade circuits, and reconfigured the geopolitical imagination of both the Indian subcontinent and the wider world. Its acerbity extended beyond taste into the making of history.

To understand pepper is to grasp thelongue dureeof Indian Ocean commerce and the piecemeal advent of early modern globalization.

The ecological specificity of pepper anchors its history...