William W. Hagen was born in 1942, and has taught at UC Davis since 1970. He is the author of Germans, Poles, and Jews: The Nationality Conflict in the Prussian East, 1772–1914 (Chicago, 1980). Ordinary Prussians is the culmination of his research over the past two decades, including two years in the Prussian State archive.

'… with its rich mines of data and insight on rural political, economic, gender and social history, this will be an essential text for years to come.' Roland Spickermann, H-German

• List of illustrations; Acknowledgements; Currencies, weights and measures employed in the text; Introduction: grand narratives, ordinary Prussians; 1. After the deluge: a noble lordship's sixteenth-century ascent and seventeenth-century crisis; 2. The Prussianization of the countryside? Noble lordship under early absolutism, 1648–1728; 3. Village identities in social practice and law; 4. Daily bread: village farm incomes, living standards and lifespans; 5. The Kleists' good fortune: family strategies and estate management in an eighteenth-century noble lineage; 6. Noble lordship's servitors and clients: estate managers, artisans, clergymen, domestic servants; 7. Farm servants, young and old: landless labourers in the villages and at the manor; 8. Policing crime and the moral order, 1700–1760: seigneurial court, village mayors, church, state and army; 9. Policing seigneurial rent: the Kleists' battle with their subjects' insubordination and the villagers' appeals to royal justice, 1727–1806; 10. Seigneurial bond severed: from subject farmers to freeholders, from compulsory estate labourers to free, 1806–1840; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.