Simon Schama 'Rough Crossings' turns on a single huge question: if you were black in America at the start of the Revolutionary War, who would you want to win?

It should be said about this great exodus that we know that before the revolutionary war, 80 per cent of runaways were men. In this particular case, what's very startling is it's almost half and half; women go in groups, as you've heard, often if the men are away or if they've gone first, this great exodus of women going in their own right.

What are they believing in? Why are they doing this? Why are they taking these chances? They were caught, they were hunted down, many of them were hanged, terrible things happened to those who took the chance of doing this. They believed in this myth (it wasn't entirely mythical) but they believed in something called British freedom, and they'd known about it astonishingly early on. We know from runaway notices in the newspapers, particularly in the Virginia Gazette...by which I mean rewards posted for the return of runaway slaves...that the negroes of the south actually knew about the ruling in 1772 by Lord Mansfield in the famous case of someone who had been an ex-slave called James Somerset, in London, who'd been kidnapped by his former owner with the intention of reselling him into slavery in the Caribbean. There were slave hunters all over London doing these kinds of things, sort of hired abductors in the 1750s, 1760s onwards.

But Somerset had a kind of hero and the first hero of the book, Granville Sharp, the deacon of Northumberland who teaches himself the law in order to organise and press their suits, because Sharp believed that the English common law and slavery were irreconcilable with each other. He cherished the phrase handed down from earlier lawsuits, that the air of England is too pure for a slave to breathe. In other words, inconsistent. So Mansfield ruled in the case of Somerset, that Somerset could not be coerced back to the boats, back to the West Indies, back to slavery against his will. Now, Mansfield was an incredibly irritated conservative about the law and was very concerned that this ruling not be taken to be construed to mean that slavery was illegal in Britain, but it was taken to mean exactly that by the black community in London and elsewhere in Britain. More particularly, it went all the way over the Atlantic because some of these runaway notices...say, Pompy, or Scipio, or Phoebe, or Sally...run away to the British ships in the deluded belief that Lord Mansfield's judgement will set them free.

So the slave owners had been hearing some of the talk in the plantations that at least the slaves thought there was something called British freedom, that the King was somehow their protector. Then came the war and the royal governors of the south were incredibly damn short of troops; Lord Dunmore, the last governor of Virginia has just 300 regular troops. So entirely out of expedient military motives, Dunmore issues a proclamation from his ship in November 1775 promising freedom, and indeed it becomes elaborated later by Sir Henry Clinton; freedom and land. Rewards for those who managed to get out of the plantations and join the British. Now, this was, as I say, not done from the milk of humanitarian kindness. If you were the slave of a loyalist; tough luck. It was if you were a slave of a rebel...so we can see the aim was less high-minded abolitionism than actually a military strike with the aim of arming African Americans to come to the King's side.

It backfired in some ways because what it did in the first place, particularly in the Carolinas, was for whites in the Carolinas who'd been slightly tentative about which side they were on to decide they had to join the American side, they had to arm themselves into white militia. The alternative was a British-sponsored slave uprising. One of them, who was a friend of George Washington's, said, `Hell hath not vomited forth a more diabolical scheme than the British emancipation of the slaves.' So in a sense, they're right, that the British are doing this out of cynicism, but sometimes from cynicism inadvertently, indirectly, actual good can come and certainly actual hope can flow. It clearly did so in the case of countless numbers of these people.

And as I listened to the whole argument made by Rev. Granville Sharp before British Crown's court on the liberty of person/subject the moment he reaches British soil and breath so pure of its air was equally entitled protection by its Common laws , I can't help but realized the change of Common Laws with the passing of time. Property owners are no longer individuals but Nation and State. Immigration Laws uphold the ground of servitude and slavery a man inherit by his birth. Is it not? Then came...

The Second Plague

Back in Europe society adjusted to the absense of famine in the wake of the migration. Industrialization changed the workplace forever, no longer was work something you learned in a few months. The average amount of training required to get a job grew and grew and grew. Women suffrage gave power to women and increased the productvity of society by demanding these new citizens to work. Cost of living grew so that women couldn't stay home even if they wanted to. Having children suddenly became a risk, endangering the wellbeing of the parents. "Next year" became the normal way of thinkinng of procreation. Then came the pension fund. It was the cure for the suffering of the old and sick, but it had a terrible side-effect. In the past you secured your old age by breeding children that took care of you in your old days, the pension system crushed this millenia-old system. The last economical reason to sire children was removed. This was a great advance for society at first. The nativity level went down steadily to levels where the risk of famine decreased to nothingness. The suffering of the old decreased radically and the old felt free in a way once reserved for the young or extremely wealthy. But the cost was a socety where death outraced birth.

In large parts of the West immigration is the only thing that so far to have stopped the slow death, or at least held it off for a while. A short term solution to the problem would be to let more immigrants into our countries, but this "solution" has another effect on the rest of the world: the removal of the highly educated. This effect is so severe in fact that for exampel China have had to stop their free university education programs that they have had for thousands of years.They simply cannot afford it when the fruit of their investments is drained away by the West. This shows a cler trend: the pool from which we draw skilled labor is slowly drying out..