Silesia in the right hands was extraordinarily valuable – in the Habsburgs’ it allowed them to threaten Brandenburg; in Brandenburgs’ it made the Habsburg lands vulnerable; in either case it separated Saxony from Poland and fatally weakened that relationship. It undoubtedly had a large and economically worthwhile population, but given how many thousands of lives were lost struggling for it and the wider wars which drew in almost every country in Europe, Silesia became ever more of an abstraction. In the nineteenth century its value as an industrial zone was considerable, but it was rapidly
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