In addition to these topics, Maxwell also studied piracy, slavery, and marginalised groups. He explored themes of contact between peoples, trade as a form of sociability, and diplomatic relations between old and new states. Many of his essays have been collected in works such as Naked Tropics: Essays on Empire and Other Rogues or Chocolate, piratas e outros malandros: ensaios tropicais [Chocolate, Pirates, and Other Scoundrels: Tropical Essays], reflecting his career-long dedication to the study of the Ibero-American world.

Throughout his career, Maxwell remained engaged with contemporary events and the politics shaping them. From 1994 to 2006, he contributed to Foreign Affairs , The New York Review of Books, the Notícias e Opinião [News and Opinion] website, and the Mais [More] section of the Folha de São Paulo [São Paulo Newspaper.] A critic of Jair Bolsonaro, Donald Trump, and Boris Johnson, Maxwell has warned of the dangers of 21st-century populism, highlighting shifting international power dynamics and potential vulnerabilities. He followed the intervention of the International Monetary Fund in Portugal, the austerity measures of Pedro Passos Coelho’s government, and the elections in 2015 that brought about a Socialist Party government supported by a left-wing coalition. In 2004, Maxwell resigned as Director of Latin American Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York after a controversy over his criticism of The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability by Peter Kornbluh for the Foreign Affairs magazine, the US approach to the Chilean landscape in the 1970s. William Rogers, an associate of US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, responded to Maxwell's review by downplaying US involvement in Pinochet's rise in 1973 and in supporting Operation Condor. Rogers went so far as to claim that the texts by Konbluh and Maxwell only served to perpetuate the mythification of Salvador Allende. The debate that emerged over the issue prompted the British historian to step away from Foreign Affairs, as he believed that his rebuttal to Rogers' second letter was not published due to pressure from Henry Kissinger on the editor, James Hoge.

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