The first one (result.zip) suggests that west african pepper was in widespread use mainly until 1550, so focusing on it as a competition with asian pepper might be an overkill, compared to the actual relevance.
That's a great source, and thank you for the effort there. I've been working in part off of that same paper - which is far more easily read
here, or on the University of Cambridge site, if you have access to that. Unfortunately I've not had much time to work on this project over this last week, and probably won't have the time to put in the same effort for a few weeks more. Luckily, I do feel like this thread's contributors have mostly come to a really good system without much more to say, other than to wait and see what Paradox ends up doing with the spice trade.
Now, onto the claim itself. While you're correct about the paper suggesting that the trade decreased, you've neglected to mention the reason stated in the very same paper, namely that Portugal suppressed the trade to keep the good from endangering their East-Asian pepper trade:
A third type of pepper, known variably as African cubebs, West African pepper, Ashantee pepper, pimenta de rabo, Piper caudatum, piper salvatico and São Tomé pimento (Piper guineense or Piper clusii Cas. DC.), was explicitly prohibited in the face of the danger of product substitution.
The fact that they had to do this is further evidence that it can substitute East-Asian peppers and should be the same good and be allowed to compete with them, as the Portuguese were afraid might happen. I'm imagining that a situation might occur where Castile gets control of the West African trade and could compete with Portugal should it get control of the East-Asian trade - or vice-versa.
The paper differentiates those west african true peppers from Grains of Paradise (Because, botanically, it's not a pepper - that is a member of the
Piper genus) and has a section discussing whether melegueta pepper should be considered to have been in competition with East Asian Peppers - and whether that's the cause of it's loss of trade with Europe. There's a lot of points for both sides here - though in my eyes it definitely leans toward there being competition between grains of paradise and east-asian peppers - and I recommend anyone considering these arguments read the whole paper, but the paper's author comes to this conclusion when discussing why the trade declined in the mid-sixteenth century:
I, by contrast, have attempted to demonstrate the consumptive overlap between black and malagueta `pepper' from contemporary descriptions of their respective tastes and culinary applications
(For reference, the "contrast" they refer to is another paper's author claiming that the trade declined due to the crown of Portugal mismanaging the trade.)
On the other hand, chili peppers had much more of an impact. Indeed, since they ended up colonizing asia as well, keeping all of them under "peppers" with events leading to an increase in locations producing peppers all around the old world could represent the influx of cheaper capsaicin sources in the global market. It will probably lead to a reduction in the importance of peppers, while at the beginning they would be mainly present in india and sumatra.
That's the reason why I've grouped them under the piquants. The substitution seems pretty widespread at the time (Though from the source, perhaps not by just putting chili in a meal when you would have used pepper, but rather mixing it with salt. I'm curious to try that and see if it is all that similar to my taste.)
It also shows a comparative table representing the prices of a few spices, suggesting that cloves and nutmegs, while originating from the same general area, had a very high price relative to peppers. Differentiating them might be reasonable, but collapsing them together in a "cloves" or "maluku spices" can work as well.
I agree that they should be differentiated from other spices. I'm not sure on the name Maluku spices, myself as they appear later in Madagascar and Zanzibar. I think Cloves is the best name for them. The fact that it also represents Nutmeg is, I think, a fair tradeoff considering that the only location nutmeg was grown, the Banda isles, is also known for its cloves. It also helps that it's a short name and much easier to read on a map while having no major downsides.
In fact, the paper explicitly mentions them together as separate:
It is also worth disaggregating some of the `fine spices’, particularly cloves and nutmeg, from the fortunes of the pepper trade.
(I'd totally missed the term "Fine spices" here before. But that might actually be the perfect name for it as a group, if we don't want to just call it cloves. It's way better than "Rare spices")
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