Scholars of modern Cambodia have generated a long shelf of contentious historiography, and Matthew Galway's The Emergence of Global Maoism is the latest addition to the stack. The mainstream view of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) among Cambodia scholars is that the party's animating ideology was an amalgam of various influences, including several strands of Communism, along with anarchism, nationalism, and indigenous sources, most prominently Buddhism. In this impressively researched new book, Galway contends that the CPK was fundamentally Maoist in orientation.
Galway develops his argument by drawing on Edward Said's “traveling theory,” which describes the diffusion of ideological ideas through three stages: production, transmission, and reception. Expanding this analytical framework, Galway adds two more stages: adaptation and implementation. In the first chapter, he demonstrates the application of this framework by examining Mao Zedong's intellectual evolution from his youth through the Cultural Revolution he implemented in China in 1966–1976....