Faramerz Dabhoiwala begins his book with an account of a couple convicted in 1612 of fornication and of producing a bastard child in the city of Westminster. They are stripped to the waist, tied to the tail of a cart, whipped from the Gatehouse Prison by the abbey all the way to Temple Bar, and there banished from the city, from their relations, their friends and their livelihoods. The strict sexual discipline imposed by the courts was popular, and it got stricter. By 1650 adultery was made a capital crime. The passions of adulterers must have been overwhelming to make them take such risks.

A hundred years later things looked very different. "A new openness about sex had transformed the culture of the English-speaking world" – at least for some. Buggery, of course, would be a capital offence for a century to come, and as at other times in history a new sexual permissiveness was not entirely good news for women. As the legal policing of heterosexual sex largely disappeared, the number of illegitimate births increased, and with it the number of women regarded as "ruined". But among heterosexual men, not just the rich and powerful but also the middle-class and moderately well-off, sexual behaviour had come to be seen as a largely private matter, with the paradoxical result that "a whole range of sexual ideas and practices, within and without marriage, was now discussed, celebrated and indulged more publicly than ever before".

This is Dabhoiwala's "first sexual revolution", and he sees it in relation partly to the movement of population from the country to the towns, where there were more places and occasions for the sexes to meet and less opportunity for the community at large to inspect and control individual behaviour. But he understands it too in relation to the enlightenment in Europe and north America, and the model it created of civilisation based on the principles of "privacy, equality, and freedom".

No one is likely to argue, but one of the good things about this book is that it does not offer to explain this revolution in terms of its supposed causes, but to place it in as wide a context as possible, as a "central part" of a model of civilisation that changed everything – the province of legislation, the influence of religion, the rights of citizens – as well as sexual behaviour and our beliefs about it. The result is an informative, wide-ranging book that is also compellingly readable.

Revolutions, of course, are never complete, and the male intellectuals in the vanguard of the sexual revolution were keen that this one would be no exception. The prohibition on polygamy was tirelessly interrogated, but no one seemed very keen to advocate polyandry, which raised questions about the inheritance of property that would have remodelled society to a much too revolutionary degree. The call to return to a legendary time when "women, and all other things were in common" was really a call to share women and nothing much else. Sexual desire was argued to be a natural appetite, like hunger or thirst, implanted by God, and which he must have intended us to satisfy; but though both men and women were meant to eat when hungry and drink when thirsty, it was surely not likely that God intended women to have sex whenever they felt like it. God had made the sexes different, and it was as "natural" for women to be chaste as it was for men to take pleasure wherever they found it.

Many writers on religion began to question the eternal punishments that a supposedly loving God was believed to visit on sexual offenders. For the libertines of the later 18th century, the new uncertainty about the dangers of hellfire transformed it from the strongest of all deterrents to a risk that put the spice into vice. But for men in public life, the greatest benefit of the sexual revolution may have been the increasing agreement that, as long as a man's sexual behaviour did not impede the fulfilment of his public duties, it was no one's business but his own.

Enlightenment thinking had a dramatic effect on how the phenomenon of prostitution was understood. The sexual liberation of well-off heterosexual men made it convenient to regard prostitution as positively necessary to the health of society, and to approach it as a social phenomenon: not just the result of the supposed moral failings of women too idle to get a proper job, but an effect of systemic ignorance and poverty. Fallen women who displayed the right kind of modest contrition became the object of fashionable charities. At the same time, it increasingly came to be seen that women become prostitutes as a result of their treatment by men, and a standard narrative begins to circulate, especially in the novel, about how prostitutes are made.

A teenage girl, the daughter of a country family of impeccable moral reputation, is spotted by a young gentleman who lays siege to her chastity with repeated promises of marriage. Hopelessly in love, the girl eventually agrees to elope with him to London. But the young gent speaks less and less of marriage, soon tires of his easy conquest, and passes her on to a friend or simply deserts her. Destitute, possibly pregnant, unable to return to her parents, she ends up on the streets.

The point of this narrative is less to condemn the behaviour of men than to persuade male and female readers alike that prostitutes are human and deserve our pity. The story fitted the new genre of the novel, which could offer a much fuller, more circumstantial account of why people behave as they do, than any previous form of literature, and was programmed to persuade us that the more we understood, the more we would forgive.

Dabhoiwala believes the novel played a vital part in changing how prostitutes came to be regarded, but I am not so sure: the tolerant morality of the novel was a frequent target of those who worried about female conduct, and even in novels themselves, novel-reading was often seen as predisposing young girls to seduction, and therefore (as the standard narrative had it) to prostitution. Respectable novelists such as Jane Austen tended to avoid the issue.

To some small degree Dabhoiwala seems to me to exaggerate his sexual revolution by allowing his eyes to drift up the social scale as his story moves forward in time. In particular, I was left wondering how far ordinary, lower-class heterosexual men shared in the freedoms enjoyed by their social superiors in the 18th century; they don't get much attention. Overall, however, he has done a wonderful job. Determined to acknowledge the limitations of the sexual revolution he describes, unwilling to minimise the advantages it brought, careful to remind us that the sexual discipline often violently enforced by some non-western cultures was, for most of its history, enforced as eagerly in the west too, Dabhoiwala has to tread a difficult path through a more or less limitless field, and he manages it with great care and unselfconscious aplomb.