We all live the histories that produced us. Gilbert Imlay's life took shape in the unfolding of two dominant historical narratives. One is a story of war and conflict, played out on a regional, national and transnational stage; the other, a story of dissent and diaspora, written into a family of emigrants and settlers. From both he inherited an awareness that harmony is only discord contained, settlement but displacement delayed. Too much history can be a bad thing; the eighteenth century had so much history, it either overwhelmed people, or it released them – from the local, the personal, the here-and-now. For Imlay, speculation, risk-taking and rootlessness were the stuff of life – the same stuff history is made of. Citizens of the world are not born – they are ineluctably made in historical experience. Gilbert Imlay was such a citizen.

Gilbert Imlay was in more than one sense a war child. Born in 1754, Imlay's entry into the world coincided with the start of the French and Indian War, as the North American theatre of the Seven Years War between France and England was called; he came of age amidst the turmoil of the Revolutionary War, during which New Jersey saw more armed engagements than any other state in the union. Directly or indirectly, both historical events would have a deeply formative impact on Imlay's future life. His experiences in the New Jersey militia and, perhaps even more so, his exposure to the near meltdown of social and legal order during the lawless years following the retreat of British forces from the province, honed his survival skills and seems to have somewhat insensitized him to the ethical and legal niceties of conventional life. Without the Herculean struggle between England and France for control over North America, the shock-waves of which were keenly felt in New Jersey and other seaboard colonies at the time, Imlay could not have become the agent provocateur who would mastermind for the post-Bastille French government the military plot that would – ostensibly – hand back to them the western territory of North America they had lost to the British.