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BBC Radio 4 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced BBC Home Service.

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Start the Week: What if the Incas had colonised Europe?

What if the Incas had colonised Europe?

BBC Radio 4 - Start the Week, What if the Incas had colonised Europe?

Andrew Marr with Laurent Binet, Caroline Dodds Pennock and Christienna Fryar.

Laurent Binet, Caroline Dodds Pennock and Christienna Fryar discuss counterfactual history and rethinking the past with Andrew Marr.

The French writer Laurent Binet’s new book Civilisations is a flight of fancy re-imagining the modern world. He tells Andrew Marr that his counter-factual novel looks at what could have happened if the Vikings had made it to America, Columbus had failed, and the Incas and Aztecs had ended up fighting over the colonisation of Europe. 

Caroline Dodds Pennock, one of the world’s foremost historians of Mesoamerican culture, considers the experiences of Indigenous Americans (such as the Aztecs, Maya, Tupi and Algonquians) coming to Europe in the sixteenth century.  She argues that these people forged the course of European civilisation, just as surely as European colonists changed America.   

Colonisation and empire-building are also at the forefront of Christienna Fryar’s historical research at Goldsmiths, University of London. In her work on the modern Caribbean and Britain she argues that their histories are intertwined and cannot be properly understood in isolation.   

Producer: Katy Hickman

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What if the Incas had colonised Europe?

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