Spanning more than two hundred years of martial adventurism, aggression, and outright blundering, Arrogant Armies chronicles the profoundly misguided and utterly calamitous military expeditions of the great empire builders and overconfident expeditionary forces. From colonial America to South Africa, from Mesopotamia to Khartoum, an extraordinary number of presumably superior armies grievously underestimated native forces.

Using contemporary newspaper accounts, military memoirs, diaries of soldiers who fought in the battles, and other firsthand letters and papers, noted journalist James Perry brings a sense of urgency and immediacy to these historic defeats. At times devastating, at times hilarious, his vast panorama of human folly is peopled by frightened soldiers, zealous native resistance, and, of course, a colorful gallery of arrogant, often inept officers.

Many of them received their ultimate comeuppance in these battles: Generals Edward Braddock, Charles MacCarthy, William R. Shafter, Charles Vere Ferrers Townshend, Charles "Chinese" Gordon, William George Keith Elphinstone, Manuel Fernandez Silvestre, and others.