Presentation short abstract

This paper departs from a recent olive disease outbreak in Southern Italy to expand debates on the Plantationocene to a Global North context. It proposes the concept of "patchy Plantationocene" to account for regional specificities while tracing structural continuities across North and South.

Presentation long abstract

Debates on the Plantationocene have gained significant traction within agrarian studies in recent years. Yet, critical scholarship has mainly focused on case studies in Global South contexts, where histories of colonial domination, labour exploitation, and dispossession are most vividly present. Less attention has been paid to how plantation logics materialise within the Global North—not only as drivers of resource extraction for global commodity markets, but as lived socio-ecological formations shaped by landscape simplification, transformed labour regimes, and disrupted multispecies relations. Although historical research has documented plantation configurations in various European and North American settings, these accounts often confine them to a distant past, obscuring how similar exploitative dynamics persist in contemporary agrarian spaces. This paper, conversely, argues that the Plantationocene is a useful analytical concept in contemporary Global North contexts as well. Drawing on the case of olive landscapes in Apulia, Southern Italy, it shows how a plant disease outbreak has exposed and accelerated longstanding tendencies toward radical landscape simplification and agricultural intensification. Historically shaped by colonial histories and later restructured under neoliberal globalization, olive plantations are now transitioning toward super-intensive systems that aim to eliminate human labour rather than exploit it, while exacerbating ecological stressors. By situating these dynamics within broader debates on the Plantationocene, the paper proposes the concept of “patchy Plantationocene” to account for regional specificities while tracing structural continuities across North and South. This perspective challenges analytical binaries, enriches agrarian political ecology, and foregrounds the multispecies and affective dimensions of capitalist agriculture in Europe’s rural margins.