The subject of military culture has been neglected in recent writing on war and eighteenth-century central European society. A great deal is now known about the material conditions of German soldiers and their relationship to civilians, but this has yet to filter through to discussions of what might be considered military culture that is still presented through the paradigm of standing armies and absolutism. The primary focus is on Prussia as the defining German military power. The Hohenzollern monarchy is widely regarded as the most heavily militarised of all the old regime great powers. Military power not only created the state, but shaped its economic and social development, fostering a slavish subservience to authority and veneration of martial values, according to the influential ‘social militarisation’ thesis of Otto Büsch. The secondary focus is on the so-called ‘petty particularism’ (Kleinstaaterei) of the lesser principalities that are often perceived as debased, yet still more extreme versions of Prussia. Examples include Landgrave Ludwig IX of Hessen-Darmstadt and Duke Carl Eugen of Württemberg who dressed and drilled their ‘miniature armies’ in the Prussian manner. Better known are the ‘Hessians’ or auxiliaries from six principalities, including Hessen-Kassel, who fought for Britain against the American Revolutionaries and have long been regarded as the archetypal mercenaries of petty despots. In short, military culture is defined as ‘militarism’ and state power as despotic ‘absolutism’.