The development of mass higher education in the UK since 1960 did not take place in a vacuum. Many of the changes that have taken place, whether in terms of national policy, institutional missions, organisational culture or teaching and research, cannot properly be explained without some consideration of the wider political, social, economic and cultural context. Mass higher education, above all, is contextualised higher education, to a degree that did not perhaps apply in the days of much smaller elite university systems. Put simply, UK higher education is different because the UK is different. The 1960s, where this story began, are now ‘another country’.

The same contextualisation is needed to make sense of the wider evolution of higher education systems across the globe in the rest of Europe, North America, Latin America, Africa, Asia (in particular, East Asia) and Australasia. The bipolar Cold War world – one half (broadly) ‘market’, liberal democratic, social reformist and the other half (nominally) Communist – has been replaced by new geopolitical alignments, shifting (and often volatile) configurations, war and terrorism, all overshadowed by the spectre of climate change and environmental degradation (and now pandemic). New economies, and economic structures, have emerged. The stable landscapes of 20th-century industrial society have crumbled to be replaced by volatile 21st-century corporate visions. Global cultures have both cohered – through the action of the mass media, the advance of world brands, and the (dubious) rise of ‘Globlish’ among other phenomena – and also fragmented – through growing hybridity and increasing resistance.

These wider contexts are the subject of this chapter. The main focus, inevitably but regrettably, is on the UK. The wider UK context is discussed under four headings:

• • ‘The Sixties to Brexit’: the political changes from 1960s to Brexit five decades later;

• • ‘Themes and trends’: major themes such as over-centralisation of political power and decision making, and the replacement of consensus by new adversarial politics;

• • ‘Economic change’: changing economic contexts, including the death of industrial England and the rise of neoliberal finance’;

• • ‘A social and cultural revolution?’: wider social change, such as the erosion of old solidarities and the rise of new ‘identities’ against a background of increasing inequalities, and a cultural revolution, rooted in the advance of social liberalism and the unbundling of traditional forms and structures of creative expression in the context of instantaneity, brands and celebrity.