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Abstract
In the past twenty-five years, scholarship on the Silesian Wars (1740-42, 1744-45, and 1756-63) has adjusted our views of these conflicts. This article identifies eight conclusions that may be drawn from this scholarship. In general, they lead to a heightened respect for Austria's military capacity but also to an enhancement of Frederick the Great's reputation as a commander. They even hint that as scholars chip away at received ideas, a view of the wars that is not basically Fredrician may be attainable.
BETWEEN 1740 and 1763 Prussia and Austria fought three wars over the possession of the province of Silesia.1 In German history these conflicts are called the Silesian Wars. In the first war (1740-42), the Prussian monarch, Frederick II (Frederick the Great), wrested the province from the Austrian monarch, Maria Theresa. In the next two wars (1744-45 and 1756-63), Prussia defended the province against Austrian efforts to recover it. These three wars mark an important moment in European history, because Prussia's success in seizing and defending Silesia conferred on the Hohenzollern realm an effective equality with Austria within the Holy Roman Empire-an equality that would endure for a full century until the Seven Weeks' War in 1866 ended the era of German dualism and established Prussia as victor in the struggle for dominance within Germany. All three wars were begun by Prussia, though in the case of the last two wars Prussia's attacks were preemptive, launched because of clear evidence that Vienna was preparing its own armies tor renewed battles against Berlin. Finally, all three struggles were fought as theater wars within a larger European-wide (indeed, world-wide) belligerence, the nrst two being aspects of the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-48) and the third being effectively the German side of the Seven Years' War (1756-63).
Though the Silesian Wars have not received extensive attention in the last two decades, neither have they been completely ignored. As a consequence, a newer and more satisfactory view of these important conflicts has been emerging. In this survey I want to draw attention to eight conclusions about the wars and their historians that the newer literature points to.
1. The first conclusion is that some historians of the era of the Silesian Wars are conflating the...