This article argues that the myth of ‘the sexual revolution’, increasingly accepted in Britain's national media between 1963 and 1967, played a central role in causing the real transformation of British sexual culture that occurred from the late 1960s. It also argues that Christian agency played an important role in the framing and the legitimation of this myth. Until 1963, British debates about sexual morality had been dominated by Christian arguments. In 1963 and 1964, the existence of a rapid, widespread, inexorable, secular, and antinomian transformation of sexual mores was prominently proclaimed by Christian commentators, who thought it an inevitable consequence of ‘secularization’, whereas secular commentators usually objected that this narrative was insufficiently evidenced. After its initial discussion in the mainstream media in 1965, the ‘sexual revolution’ narrative was increasingly articulated without explicit reference to Christianity, but it usually retained theologically inspired structural features inherited from earlier religious discussions. In the late 1960s, elite perceptions of inexorable sexual liberalization decisively legitimated rapid decensorship, wider access to the pill, and the reimagination of ‘normal’ sexual behaviour, thereby importantly shaping real popular change. In this way, Christian clergymen made a significant, early, unwitting, and hitherto unacknowledged contribution to Britain's sexual revolution.

Labour history has been revitalized by the global turn. It has encouraged historians to look beyond national frameworks to explore issues relating to mobility and inter-territorial connection. This article, while accepting the benefits of a global approach, argues that historians should not lose sight of the factors that constrain mobility or lead to the collapse of cross-border exchanges. Singapore's dockworkers were at the forefront of the island's anti-colonial campaigns of the 1940s and 1950s. Inspired by anti-colonial movements elsewhere in the world, dockworkers drew on international discourses relating to self-determination to place their local struggles in a global context. This activism, however, coincided with the emergence of countervailing forces, including the universalization of the nation-state and the rise of state-led developmentalism. In this context, dockworkers’ internationalism came to be regarded as a threat to state sovereignty and development. As a result, once Singapore achieved independence the ruling People's Action Party encouraged dockworkers to abandon their globalized outlook in the name of modernization and nation building. Global history, then, should be as much about the rise of the national as the transnational, and the loss of connection as the forging of inter-territorial networks.

Within the expanding field of global history, historians often conceive of distinct integrated ‘worlds’: discrete if permeable cultural units capable of coherent study. Some are defined exogenously through factors such as oceanic geography, others are conceived of endogenously through the cultures and identities of their adherents. In this context, this article critically assesses the recent voluminous literature on the British world: a unit increasingly distinguished from British imperial history and defined by the networks and identities of global Britishness. The article argues that the British world, while making valuable contributions to the historiography of empire and of individual nations, fails ultimately to achieve sufficiently clear definition to constitute a distinctive field of study and neglects the crucial concerns of imperial history with politics and power, while flattening time, space, and neglecting diversity. While highlighting many key concerns, other methodologies such as settler colonialism, whiteness studies, or revivified imperial history are better placed to take these on than the nebulous concept of a world. More broadly, an analysis of the British world highlights the problems inherent in attempting to define a field endogenously through a focus on identity.

On 29 November 1814, the Austrian Emperor Francis, the Russian Tsar Alexander, and the Prussian King Frederick Wilhelm, along with 6,000 others, attended a concert in Vienna's Redouten Hall; Beethoven personally conducted three of his works: the Seventh symphony, the bombastic ‘Wellington's victory’, and a newly written cantata entitled ‘The glorious moment’. In this cantata, the figure of ‘Vienna’ sings the following words:

Oh heaven, what delight!
What spectacle greets my gaze!
All that the earth holds in high honour
Has assembled within my walls!
My heart throbs! My tongue stammers!
I am Europe – no longer one city.