It tells of the legal battles which established that slavery was not valid in England itself, and how the British government offered freedom to enslaved African Americans if they would fight for Britain and King George III.

The descendants of those who settled in Freetown are part of the Sierra Leone Creole people, with strong ancestral ties with the United States, the Caribbean, and Canada.

Alex Butterworth wrote in The Guardian: The early chapters of Rough Crossings still bear traces of the television habit - the scene-setting rhetoric, a tendency to over-emphasis [sic] vivid 'moments', precise character thumbnail ... As the book weaves through London, America, Nova Scotia and Africa, though, Schama's technique relaxes, to be laid, most strikingly, at the service of the book's black characters.

[2] The New York Times' Brent Staples praised the book as well, describing it as "a stirringly ambitious reconsideration of the Revolution with the question of slavery set at the very heart of the matter".

[5][6] A reviewer stated that the "success of this endeavour is unfortunately limited as the programme fails to inform its audience which this history should be remembered apart from its perceived strangeness and neglect".