Capsicum out of the Americas: the pepper's route east and the Iberian sweet pepper

The chilli is a Mesoamerican domesticate whose worldwide career began in Iberian ships. Genetics corrects the usual telling on three points: C. annuum won the world probably by arriving first rather than by being better; the Iberian Peninsula became a secondary centre of diversity where farmers bred the pungency out and produced the sweet pepper and pimenton; and much of the dispersal ran on Portuguese routes and on the triangular Atlantic slave trade rather than Spanish ones.