The errant trajectories of people and things that shape the Shandean universe testify to a widespread form of ‘lunacy’ characteristic of the imperial project in mid-century Britain. It was not only philosophers who reflected on the troubling presence of the ‘world in the moon’, and the potential affiliations with the fortunes of unknown others who inhabited it. These were flows which traversed the globe, connecting lives and territories in previously unimaginable and accidental ways. If the experience of empire itself was not new in the 1760s, though the reach of British power was unparalleled, its administration and governance now required new forms of cultural labour which in their imaginative projection began to unsettle the boundaries of ‘home’ in distinctive ways. For all the craziness of attempting to chart and understand the ‘tentacular’ movement of conquest and commerce, it proved a sober enterprise in orientation even in the most domestic of circumstances.