Abstract
The seventeenth-century plantations and movements of people into Ulster gave rise to a hybrid society in terms of ethnicity, politics and religion. These upheavals shaped its demography, though the original identities proved more malleable than is sometimes assumed, both in the short and the long run. Kennedy, Miller and Gurrin show how a thinly populated region in 1600 had come to hold a disproportionate share of the island’s population two centuries later, as the economic and demographic ‘centre of gravity of the island’ moved northwards. Religious demography, seemingly inevitably, formed an important part of the story. The authors go on to unfold a new explanation of Ulster’s and, by implication, Ireland’s population explosion, before considering its nemesis in the catastrophic famine of 1846-50. The years between the Famine and the Great War were marked by lesser shocks and some demographic surprises. More generally, the chapter underlines the point that the ‘historic’ province of Ulster was not a homogenous entity but rather one in which subregions and localities could have widely varying social structures and [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected] (forms part of a larger research programme): Guggenheim Foundation & National Endowment for the Humanities.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Ulster since 1600: Politics, Economy & Society |
Place of Publication | Oxford |
Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Pages | 58-73 |
ISBN (Print) | 978–0–19–958311–9 |
Publication status | Published (in print/issue) - 22 Nov 2012 |