When Greek historians turned their attention to the Roman Empire, the main question they sought to answer, which they displayed prominently in their introductions, was the reason for the success of the Empire. Success was defined in terms of acquisition, extent, stability and duration of conquest. Polybius, although not the first Greek historian of Rome, was perhaps the first to formulate the question, which he stated like a banner in the introduction to his complex work: his purpose was to explain ‘by what means and under what system of government the Romans succeeded in less than fifty-three years in bringing under their rule almost the whole of the inhabited world, an achievement which is without parallel in human history’. A century later, Dionysius of Halicarnassus did Polybius one better by adding duration of rule to Rome’s achievement: ‘the supremacy of the Romans has far surpassed all those that are recorded from earlier times, not only in the extent of its dominion and in the splendor of its achievements – which no account has as yet worthily celebrated – but also in the length of time during which it has endured down to our day’; and his long preface is filled with other such proclamations. In the second century CE, Appian of Alexandria wrote the same idea in less florid prose: ‘No ruling power up to the present time ever achieved such size and duration’, after stating which he embarked on a long proof. These three historians are representative of a prevailing trend.

Chapter 1 provides the theoretical justification for the book and proposes a new framework for explaining what scholar Albert Hirschman calls "voice" after "exit" against authoritarian regimes.

The status of Rome vis-à-vis the Roman empire is analyzed. Fears that it might be replaced and the imperial capital would be transferred are reported from the first century BC onward. Foundation myths suggested that Rome originated in the East, in Troy, and it was suspected that the capital might move back to the East. These suspicions did not materialize for centuries but became reality under Constantine with the refoundation of Byzantium as Constantinople. The choice of Constantinople as (eastern) capital may not have been a matter of course from the start. Other cities seem to have been considered first, and it is not certain why it was chosen. Furthermore, there is no contemporary evidence that Constantine always conceived his new foundation as the eastern capital of the empire, or that he intended that it should replace Rome. Claims, made first by Christian authors, that Constantine’s city was conceived from the start as the new or second Rome and also as a purely Christian city cannot be confirmed. The city actually took time to develop into an imperial capital. The city became the undisputed centre of the late Roman empire only in the reign of Theodosius I.

The Conclusion summarizes the book's contribution and details the implications of The Arab Spring Abroad for future studies of transnational activism, diaspora mobilization, and immigrant politics.

Chapter 6 demonstrates how the varied conversion of diaspora activists' resources—their home-country network ties, social capital, and fungible resources—mitigated their interventions in the Libyan, Syrian, and Yemeni revolutions from the United States and Great Britain.

This chapter offers a brief study of mainly Latin ethnic proverbs that apply collective names of ethnic groups and associate them with fixed attributes. By analyzing such proverbial allusions, it shows that the “others” from the point of view of the Romans were located anywhere in the inhabited known world at the time, but there was special interest either in neighbouring and well-known people or in remote groups dwelling at the fringes of the world. The first, closer group, became the focus of mockery and the second, remote group, was so distant and unknown that its members became typed as strange and weird.

Colonialism and plantation slavery were primarily geographic endeavors of conquering and staking claim to land and space. Rather than focus on the transience or permanency of escape, that is to say the debates about petit and grand marronnage, this chapter argues that maroons were spatially pervasive in Saint Domingue and employed their knowledge of geographic settings and geopolitical borders to subvert locations delineated for plantation development and imperial expansion. Mountains, sinkholes, caves, and rivers provided physical pathways for maroons to secretly traverse the colony or to stake out hiding spaces. The geopolitical border dividing French Saint Domingue and Spanish Santo Domingo also represented a form of cultural knowledge that Africans in Saint Domingue exploited for well over a century by taking up arms against both empires and fleeing to Santo Domingo, seeking freedom from enslavement or better treatment and quality of life.

Historical sources, and epigraphical and archeological finds attest to the presence of the Roman military presence and the establishment of the Roman base at Legio-Kefar ‘Othnay, first by soldiers of the Legio II Traiana, and slightly thereafter by the Legio VI Ferrata. An archaeological survey in the Legio area proposed the precise location of the Roman legionary base. A geophysical survey and excavation seasons allow us to assess that its size resembles Roman legionary bases in other parts of the empire during the second–third centuries CE. In this chapter we discuss the small finds from the site such as roof tiles/bricks with Roman military stamps, coins with countermarks and Roman weapons and assess their contribution to the understanding of Roman military presence by the II Traiana and the VI Ferrata legions at the site from the second to the beginning of the fourth century CE, at the latest.