The German 1730s military dataset is a dataset based on military lists created by the Kingdom of Bavaria and its predecessors. The period studied ranges from the 1720s to the 1770s. The data is partially made up of volunteer military recruits, which comes with their own special selectivity issues, and partially from a drafting system which is described in the study by Baten (1997). There is also a minimum height requirement for recruits, which requires truncated regression analysis. The measurement was taken in Bavarian feet or Rhenish feet, depending on which (sub-) principality recruited the soldiers. Occupations are only mentioned for about 1,500 soldiers out of a total of over 18,000. This is partially because only a fraction of the soldiers were recorded with occupations and partially because farming was not listed as an occupation – this is especially relevant as farming was the most widespread occupation (80% of Bavaria’s economy was agricultural at this time), and second and third sons of farmers who did not inherit, joined the army in particularly large numbers. Regional information was collected for all observations in the three broad regions – Bavaria, the southern half of today’s Bavaria; Upper Palatinate, which is the central-eastern quarter of Bavaria today; and Palatinate, which is the eastern half of Rhineland-Pfalz as well as northwestern Baden-Württemberg today.