Vanilla out of Mesoamerica: a Totonac crop, a Spanish distribution network, and three centuries of Mexican monopoly

Vanilla was domesticated and cured in Mesoamerica long before Europeans saw it, and Spain's contribution was distribution rather than invention: by 1631 a Madrid monograph on chocolate treats the pods of Campeche as the best and says everyone puts them in. Cultivation outside the native range began only in 1832, and genomics now finds at least two hybridisation-based domestication events in Mexico behind a crop whose clonal propagation has left it genetically thin.