ABSTRACT
The Prussian Province of Silesia was conquered and annexed by Frederick the Great in 1742. Originally Polish and with a population almost entirely Polish in Upper Silesia until the eighteenth century, it passed from Poland to the kingdom of Bohemia in 1526 and was absorbed into the Habsburg dominions until its conquest by Prussia. At that time, the more closely settled section was in the centre, around Breslau, while the northern area (Lower Silesia) was thinly-peopled heathland, and the southern area in Upper Silesia was also forested with a scattered Polish-speaking population. The central area, together with the Sudetes uplands, is thus the historic core of Silesia with its capital in Breslau. But the southern sector has one of the greatest coalfields in Europe, and its development in the last two generations as a new, populous, industrial orbit of human organization and space-relations has created one of the thorniest problems of political geography in central Europe.
