The French Revolution saw the overthrow and execution of the previously reigning French Monarch. Both King Louis XVI and his wife Marie Antoinette would be brutally executed by guillotine in 1793. For the next twenty years, Europe would enter a series of large-scale military conflicts. These wars, often called the Coalition Wars, involved, at some point or another, almost all European nations and had a worldwide impact. They only ended when Napoleon Bonaparte was defeated at Waterloo in 1815.

Equiano had settled in London after he had bought his freedom. This is where his major classical works were published and how he got recognized as an individual. He initially came from Africa where he was taken to Barbados, only to be sold into slavery in Virginia where he had worked on a field plantation. London is the place where he finally settled down and fought for the freedom of other African Americans.