History of Ireland (1691–1800)
The history of Ireland from 1691–1800 was marked by the dominance of the Protestant Ascendancy. These were Anglo-Irish families of the Anglican Church of Ireland, whose English ancestors had settled Ireland in the wake of its conquest by England and colonisation in the Plantations of Ireland, and had taken control of most of the land. Many were absentee landlords based in England, but others lived full-time in Ireland and increasingly identified as Irish. (See Early Modern Ireland 1536-1691). During this time, Ireland was nominally an autonomous Kingdom with its own Parliament; in actuality it was a client state controlled by the King of Great Britain and supervised by his cabinet in London. The great majority of its population, Roman Catholics, were excluded from power and land ownership under the penal laws. The second-largest group, the Presbyterians in Ulster, owned land and businesses but could not vote and had no political power. The period begins with the defeat of the Catholic Jacobites in the Williamite War in Ireland in 1691 and ends with the Acts of Union 1800, which formally annexed Ireland in a United Kingdom from 1 January 1801 and dissolved the Irish Parliament.
Economic situation[edit]
In the wake of the wars of conquest of the 17th century, completely deforested of timber for export (usually for the Royal Navy) and for a temporary iron industry in the course of the 17th century, Irish estates turned to the export of salt beef, pork, butter, and hard cheese through the slaughterhouse and port city of Cork, which supplied England, the British navy and the sugar islands of the West Indies. George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne wondered "how a foreigner could possibly conceive that half the inhabitants are dying of hunger in a country so abundant in foodstuffs?" In the 1740s, these economic inequalities, when combined with an exceptionally cold winter and poor harvest, led directly to the famine of 1740–1741, which killed about 400,000 people. In the 1780s, due to increased competition from salted-meat exporters in the Baltic and North America, the Anglo-Irish landowners rapidly switched to growing grain for export, while their impoverished tenants ate potatoes and groats.[1][2][3]
Peasant secret societies became common in 18th century Ireland as the chief means of changing landlords' behaviour. These illegal formations called themselves names like the Whiteboys, the Rightboys, the Hearts of Oak and the Hearts of Steel. Issues that motivated them included high rents, evictions, enclosure of common lands and payment of tithes to the state church, the Anglican Church of Ireland. Methods used by the secret societies included the killing or maiming of livestock, tearing down of enclosure fences and occasionally violence against landlords, bailiffs and the militia. Rural discontent was exacerbated by the rapidly growing population – a trend that would continue until the Great Famine of the 1840s.[4][5][6]
Great economic disparities existed between different areas of the country, with the north and east being relatively highly developed, rich and involved in export of goods, whereas much of the west was roadless, hardly developed and had a cashless subsistence economy with a growing dependence on the potato as the main food supply.
Legacy[edit]
This period in Irish history has been called "the long peace"[22] and indeed for nearly one hundred years, there was little political violence in Ireland, in stark contrast to the previous two hundred years. Nevertheless, the period 1691–1801 began and ended in violence. By its close, the dominance of the Protestant Ascendancy that had ruled the country for 100 years was beginning to be challenged by an increasingly assertive Catholic population, and was ended by the Acts of Union 1800 that created the United Kingdom from January 1801. The violence of the 1790s had shattered the hopes of many radicals that the old sectarian divisions in Irish society could be forgotten. Presbyterians in particular largely abandoned their alliance with Catholics and radicals in the 19th century. Under the leadership of Daniel O'Connell, Irish nationalism would in the future be a more exclusively Catholic phenomenon. Many Protestants saw their continued pre-eminence in Irish society, and their hopes for the Irish economy, as being guaranteed only by the Union with Britain and became unionists.
