REVERSED GLOBALIZATION IN THE UCHRONIAN NOVEL CIVILIZATIONS BY LAURENT BINET

Abstract

Our article focuses on Laurent Binet’s novel Civilizations (2019), as a contemporary uchronia centered on the concept of “reversed globalization.” The premise is simple yet striking: what if Christopher Columbus had not discovered America in 1492, but rather the Inca emperor Atahualpa had conquered Europe in 1531? Binet bases this vision on the idea of historian Patrick Boucheron that in the 15th century “other globalizations were possible” and constructs an alternative history in which Europe is no longer the center of conquest, but a space that has itself become the object of conquest.
In the first part of the paper, we consider the concept of uchronia, a genre defined in the 19th century by the philosopher Charles Renouvier. It is a literary practice that is based on a “point of divergence,” a moment in the past when history could have taken a different course. Unlike official history, uchronia does not treat facts as final and immutable, but rather reshapes them into fictional alternatives with a critical, pedagogical, and speculative function. It is important to note that uchronia is neither revisionism nor negationism: it does not deny historical facts, but imagines what might have been if events had taken a different course.
In the second part, we analyze Civilizations from this perspective. After a brief review of Binet’s work, we turn our attention to the novel’s four-part structure. In The Saga of Freydis Eriksdottir, a minor figure from the Norse sagas becomes the pioneer of a global upheaval. In The Diary of Christopher Columbus (fragments), the author parodies the style of a ship’s logbook, depicting Columbus as never returning to Europe but remaining captive among the Taínos, symbolically interrupting the beginning of the “official” history of the discovery of America. The Chronicles of Atahualpa form the heart of the novel: the Inca emperor arrives in Lisbon, takes advantage of Europe’s divisions and crises (the Reformation, the Inquisition, dynastic struggles) and, by imposing his own laws, reverses the course of world history. Finally, the section titled The Adventures of Cervantes blurs the boundaries between the writer’s life and fiction, connecting him to his own hero Don Quixote and reminding us of the power of literature to rewrite history.
In conclusion, we emphasize that Civilizations reverses six centuries of European history, deconstructing the Eurocentric vision of the past and proposing a utopian alternative in which the roles of colonizers and colonized are inverted. Binet shows that “two hundred men” could reverse the fate of a continent, as the conquistadors did in America, but now on European soil. Thus, uchronia becomes a space for critical reflection and political imagination, rather than a mere play with the past. The novel testifies to the power of fiction to question historical necessity and to open horizons toward more just and desirable alternatives.