Interesting question.

At The Times there's one of those discussions about time travel and what bit of history you'd like to prevent or alter. The usual suspects of mass murdering dictators, assassins and religious zealotry are mentioned along with a few predictable contemporary names and some Douglas Admas style "we should never have left the sea: stuff, but one commenter brought up an interesting idea.

I'm surprised no-one has said going back far enough to reconcile the crown and the colonies and so prevent the American revolution. Not that this was a bad thing, for the colonists at any rate, but only because the political consequences would be so fascinating and far-reaching./span>

The thought's occurred to me before. What if George III - the man who later told John Adams that he'd have been the last to agree to the colonies' independence - had been more reasonable? What if he'd accepted the petitions of the colonists at a fairly early stage? Might the Boston Tea Party, the rebellion and the war all have been avoided or had the colonists already developed a taste for self rule and independence? I don't know as much about the time, the place or the people living in it as I'd like so it's all a bit speculative, but it would have been interesting if history had taken a slightly different course and some of those colonists who had become passionate about "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" been able to spread their ideas in Britain.

Failing that it might have been interesting to interrupt the drafting of the US Constitution in 1787 and ask them if they had the slightest idea how, in a little over two centuries, the document they were working so hard over would be simultaneously revered and shat on, and how life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness would have the unofficial caveat of "as long as the government are okay with it" added to the end.