In 1847, William Wells Brown published a memoir titled Narrative of WilliamWells Brown, A Fugitive Slave. The book established Brown as a celebrity amongabolitionists. He began working for the Anti-Slavery Association in Boston. Hewent on a lecture tour to talk about his life and the lives of slaves, and alwaysthe focus was on how to end the institution of slavery. Then he was invited to attendthe 1849 International Peace Congress in Paris. He took full advantage of the opportunity, arriving in England in July, one month before the Peace Congress was to convene. Hethen spent the next three years traveling Europe and giving lectures. The essence of his European experience was distilled into a series of letters written to friends and then compiled into a book titled Three Years in Europe, which was published in 1854.

According to scholarCharles Baraw, "with the publication of Three Years in Europe, Brown produces a new kind of 'fugitive tourism' that adopts key conventions of Anglo-American travel-historical sightseeing, museum-going, literary pilgrimages, and the sentimental encounter with the Other- and transforms them into powerful counter-narratives that expose the instability of monumental histories of nation, empire, and race.".