Geograficzno-statystyczny atlas Polski

Summary

The second edition of the Geographical-Statistical Atlas of Poland, edited by Eugeniusz Romer, professor of geography at the University of Lwów, brings together the work of numerous specialists to provide a synoptic cartographic account of Poland and its neighboring regions in the aftermath of the First World War. Organized around approximately thirty-four thematic plates, the atlas combines maps, classified statistical data, diagrams, and multilingual Polish-English-French legends. Most general maps use a scale of 1:5,000,000, while selected industrial areas are shown in greater detail. The physical-geographical section begins with hypsometry, sea depth, marshes, peaks, and major towns, and proceeds to tectonic structures, geological formations, mineral-bearing strata, glacial limits, temperature, precipitation, climatic regions, and phytogeographical divisions. Together these plates reveal contrasts among the Baltic lowlands, the Polish plains, the Carpathians, and the eastern borderlands. Historical and political maps reconstruct Poland’s maximum territorial reach, its frontier in 1772, the three partitions, the Duchy of Warsaw, and Congress Poland. They also record the unsettled postwar order through treaty frontiers, plebiscite territories, the Free City of Danzig, the Memel area, the Foch Line, and lands provisionally administered by Poland in 1919–1920. Demographic plates examine population density, annual increase, urban concentration, language, nationality, and religion. In particular, they map the proportion and historical extent of the Polish-speaking population alongside Ukrainian, Belarusian, Russian, German, Lithuanian, Jewish, and other communities, thereby connecting contemporary demographic patterns with earlier linguistic boundaries. The economic section surveys agriculture, livestock, mineral resources, mining output, industrial employment, and branches of industry. It emphasizes the concentration of coal, zinc, lead, iron, salt, petroleum, and associated manufacturing in Upper Silesia and the wider Polish industrial district, while also comparing regional levels of cattle, horse, sheep, and goat husbandry. A distinctive plate on popular savings analyzes deposits per capita and differences associated with nationality, religious affiliation, and Polish or non-Polish credit cooperatives, offering an indirect measure of socioeconomic inequality. The concluding transport maps compare railway speed, double tracking, network density, freight intensity, navigable rivers, canals, steam navigation, and river-port turnover. These patterns expose the uneven infrastructural legacies of the former Russian, Prussian, and Austrian partitions. Overall, the atlas integrates environmental conditions, historical change, ethnodemographic composition, production, finance, and communications within a single visual framework. It functions both as an ambitious regional survey and as an early twentieth-century exercise in statistical cartography, using scientific representation to articulate the territorial, demographic, and economic coherence of the re-established Polish state.