In the early volumes of Tristram Shandy the narrator refers to the ‘world’ he is representing as ‘a small circle described upon the circle of the great world, of four English miles diameter’ (TS 1.7.10). If this gesture registers the impossibility of comprehending the extent of that wider world in a single totalising vision, its use of the local is nonetheless a response to such a historical condition; a means, as I discussed earlier, of figuring a form of counter-modernity. Yet there is more to discover in Sterne's act of enclosure. It emerges in a gendered tale about the balance of power in that provincial community, which circulates around the birth of Tristram himself. Ranged on one side are the forces of the ‘female part of the parish’ and their elderly midwife, whose reputation forms the circumference of the circle, and, on the other, beleaguered exponents of patriarchal principle, intent on ensuring the male offspring's ‘scientific’ entry into the world. It is a short step from the contested boundaries of household and community to the imagining of the state in the mid-eighteenth century. Indeed there is a concerted turn towards the re-energising of older homologies of family and state, which is marked in the fictional, political and legal narratives of the period. In what follows, I explore the sexual politics of such imagining, in order to chart the complexity of the making and unmaking of the state at this time, and its particular fascination with the body political birth of ‘a BEING guarded and circumscribed with rights’ (TS 1.2.3).