John Bagnell Bury saw the Byzantine Empire as a continuation of the Roman Empire and he explicitly called Byzantine History, Roman History. In this book Bury deals with one of the most important periods of Byzantine Empire, a period of Empire's transition from Ancient kingdom into medieval state.

John Bagnell Bury (1861 – 1927) was an Irish historian, classical scholar, Medieval Roman historian and philologist. He objected to the label "Byzantinist" explicitly in the preface to the 1889 edition of his Later Roman Empire. He held the position of Erasmus Smith's Professor of Modern History at Trinity College Dublin.