[2] Rebellion and revolution: c. 1780–1800

The interaction of political, religious and economic developments in Ulster was an almost inevitable consequence of the settlement patterns already traced. As well as distinctive religious and ethnic traits, the immigrants of the seventeenth century brought with them new w skills upon which came to depend the economic life of the province, and which combined with other factors further to distinguish its socioeconomic development from that of the rest of Ireland. The most important ingredient in the opening up of the interior of Ulster to economic prosperity, for example, was the development of the linen industry.1 Although the Huguenots have been traditionally credited with this important economic contribution, it is now clear that these late seventeenth-century entrepreneurs were able to build upon the hand-loom weaving and basic bleaching skills brought from the north of England by earlier seventeenth-century immigrants, who had themselves acquired the indigenous spinning skills for which the Irish had long been noted.2 It was this combination of influences and enterprises which made Ulster the ‘cradle of the linen trade in Ireland’ by the last quarter of the eighteenth century. However, the prosperity of the domestic linen industry in south Ulster had significant repercussions on the localities in which it took strongest root. It put severe pressure on traditional social and administrative structures and resulted in periodic outbursts of violence.3