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Introduction Ever since the seventeenth century the north of Ireland has been different from the rest of the country. What initially set the north apart was of course the early seventeenth-century plantations of Ulster from Scotland and England. As a result, the Gaelic order was overthrown and replaced by a new society in which the ruling class of mainly Anglican landowners stood in a special political relationship with those sections of the lower classes who were either Presbyterians or members of the Church of Ireland . Fear of a Catholic political and economic recovery solidified this bond. The relationship was to be severely strained at a few points in succeeding centuries, usually when the economic interests of the landed elite and those of the Protestant lower orders sharply diverged. But the Protestant lower classes never became so thoroughly alienated from their betters that they were prepared to unite wholeheartedly with Catholics in dismantling the traditional political and social structure.l Also setting the north dramatically apart was its precocious industrial development, at first in a rural setting and subsequently in an urban 1. For the Ulster plantations, see especially Moody, Londonderry plantation; Michael Perceval-Maxwell, The Scottish migration to Ulster in the reign ofJames I (London, 1973); Aidan Clarke (with R. D. Edwards), "Pacification, plantation, and the Catholic question , 1603-23" in T. W. Moody, F. X. Martin, and F. J. Byrne (ed.), A new history of Ireland , vol. iii: early modern Ireland, 1534-1691 (Oxford, 1976), pp. 193-205, 222-4; A. T. Q. Stewart, The narrow ground: aspects of Ulster, 1609-1969 (London, 1977), pp. 21-41. The special relationship between the mainly Anglican landowners and the Protestant "lower orders" is a recurrent theme of D. W. Miller's recent book, Queen:~ rebels: Ulster loyalism in historical perspective (Dublin and New York, 1978). 143 144 LAND AND RELIGION IN ULSTER environment. For most of the seventeenth century, Ulster, along with Connacht, was economically the least developed of the provinces of Ireland . Beginning in the 1680s and 1690s, however, the expansion of the linen industry transformed the character and economy of the countryside , especially in the counties of Antrim, Armagh, Down, Londonderry, and Tyrone. The phenomenal growth in exports of linen cloth during the eighteenth century tells the story in a nutshell. In 1700 fewer than half a million yards of Irish linen were exported to England, whereas in 1800 Britain took more than 38 million yards. Even though the linen industry had spread by the latter date to parts of north Leinster and Connacht , the weaving of cloth, as distinct from the spinning of yarn, was heavily concentrated in east Ulster. Particularly in this region of the province , the relative economic importance of agriculture substantially declined , and the quality of the farming there scandalized agricultural improvers like Arthur Young.2 As in other parts of Europe, so too in the north of Ireland, protoindustrialization acted as a spur to demographic expansion, especially in the second half of the eighteenth century. In those areas where weaving flourished , farmer-weavers were easily persuaded to divide their holdings with their sons when the latter were still comparatively young, since fathers and sons both won their livelihood far more from their looms than from agriculture. The hand-spinning of yarn also encouraged relatively early marriages by providing young women with a source of income that made them more attractive as nuptial partners. Such conditions almost certainly increased marital fertility; the prosperity associated with the linen industry in the late eighteenth century probably also raised life expectancy by reducing infant and child mortality. To this combination of factors may chiefly be attributed the doubling of the population of Ulster from some 600,000 or 700,000 in 1753 to more than 1,400,000 in 1791. Had it not been for emigration, which was heaviest from the northern province throughout the eighteenth century, the increase would have been greater still,3 2. On the development of the linen industry in the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, see Gill, Ir. linen industry, pp. 6-220; Cullen, Anglo-Ir. trade, pp. 58-66, 10710 ; Cullen, An economic history of Ireland since 1660 (London, 1972), pp. 24-5,59-64; W. H. Crawford, Domestic industry in Ireland: the experience ofthe linen industry (Dublin, 1972), pp. 1-37. 3. For the most recent estimate of the increase in the population of Ulster during the late eighteenth century, see Stuart Daultry, David Dickson, and Cormac 6 Gnida...

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