With Maoism: A Global History, Julia Lovell offers the first scholarly exploration of Mao Zedong's impact on the world at large. She implicitly defines Maoism as a body of texts published under his name between the 1930s and 1960s and as the practice of Chinese Communist foreign policy from 1949 to 1976. This dual definition allows her to cover a wide range of developments in Asia, Africa, West Europe and the Americas from the 1930s to current times. Throughout his political career from the 1930s to the 1970s, Mao exploited a varied tool set – his theoretical advocacy of physical violence for revolutionary ends, his ability to coin catchy slogans, his constructed personality cult, and his talent at charming, manipulating and deceiving friend and foe alike – to project his revolutionary appeal far beyond the People's Republic of China. The book starts with the period of internal exile of the Chinese Communist Party in Yan'an (1935–45). This was not only the place where Mao rose from revolutionary practitioner to Marxist philosopher king, but also the mythical revolutionary outpost that Edgar Snow visited in need of a journalistic scoop. The American journalist allowed himself to be manipulated into writing Red Star Over China, a glowing portrait of a supposedly utopian and happy Communist society. His quickly written volume turned out to be the political windfall hoped for by Mao's Communists in China and abroad. In the remaining chapters of her book, Julia Lovell guides readers in chronological fashion through the Maoist projects in Indonesia, Africa, Indochina, Western Europe, the United States, Peru, India, Nepal and Xi Jinping's China. Despite the claims to create an egalitarian society and help the downtrodden and victimized of the world, the vast majority of Maoists in China and abroad came from privileged backgrounds, were well educated, and, in the process of making revolution, unapologetically dispensed suffering and even death to those whom they claimed to help.

Maoism delivers the global history, which the subtitle promises. Julia Lovell's accessible prose and extensive use of engrossing anecdotes indisputably will appeal to a wider audience in and beyond academia. The author forcefully insists on writing against the widely held but erroneous idea – promoted by an embarrassed post-Maoist China – that the PRC was isolated from 1949 to 1976, when the opening under the prudent leadership of Deng Xiaoping supposedly started. On the contrary, the demographically large but economically weak People's Republic of China, as Julia Lovell shows, was engaging with the outside world for many decades before Mao's death, committing enormous political, human, financial and military resources to Indonesia, Indochina and Africa in the process. Her book treads a fine line between painstakingly reconstructing the historical record and making clear-cut judgements. In her interpretation, Mao and his utopian republic faced enormous but generally self-produced contradictions. The universal claims of Maoism often clashed with its parochial practices, most visibly during the Sino-Soviet Split. The philosopher king more often than not was grossly uninformed about domestic conditions and the world at large, but quick to pronounce a strong opinion about nearly everything. In the end, most of the Maoist projects were abject failures that led to millions of dead at home and hundreds of thousands killed outside the PRC. Even if Maoism had been a significant force in Cold War history, as the author correctly claims, it had always been a lethal project.

Although Julia Lovell's choice to write a popular history allows a wider range of readers to enjoy the results of her scholarly research, it comes with inherent pitfalls. The many anecdotes often drive and thus dominate the narrative, to a certain degree at the expense of rigorous analysis. In a number of chapters, the strong focus on Mao and the PRC distracts from the exploration of why parts of the outside world were so receptive to Maoism. Also, local conditions tend to receive an uneven treatment in different parts of the book. Because Maoist policies did not primarily target West Europe and the United States, for example, Julia Lovell unavoidably focuses on describing pre-existing conflicts along generational lines, class, and ethnicity to explain Maoist developments in both world regions. But in the chapter on Peru's Shining Path, the reader receives only a bare (and simplified) minimum of coverage about the specific conditions that allowed Maoism to become a major political force in the 1980s and 1990s. Yet, why did it make an impact in that particular country, but not in other Latin American places that suffered from similar socio-economic crises and military rule? Likewise, the cases covered in the book vary greatly in significance and nature. Chinese revolutionary investments were immense in Indonesia, Indochina or Africa, but only minor in Peru and India, and non-existent in West Europe, the United States and Nepal. In Peru and Nepal, local Maoist groups rose despite the absence of Chinese commitments, while in West Europe, the United States and India, they remained on the political fringe for most of their existence. Are all of these cases comparable, or are there concentric circles of declining Maoist significance throughout the world?

Julia Lovell's book combines an enormous amount of secondary literature from different scholarly subfields, archival research on four continents, and the fruits of personal interviews, all of which are discreetly footnoted in the body of the text. Regrettably, the sensitive political nature of her topic prevented her from accessing some of the most crucial archival holdings, particularly in China, but she instead drew on multiple memoirs and secondary sources, mostly in Chinese and English. The book will engage non-academic readers with its accessibility and scholars with its provocative restoration of Maoism to a central place in international affairs. Its measured conclusions will neither please the Chinese Communist Party nor pander to the anti-Chinese reflexes among certain parts of the Western audience. Most readers will come to see Maoism: A Global History as a balanced and well-researched book on a topic that for too long has not received the scholarly attention it requires.