DAVE MANSELL function, however: to ensure that tenancies were prevented from passing into the hands of the other religion, and to this end they fought the Catholic societies. Even at this level of oppression the religious division could assert itself by the operation of scarcity. It was one of these skirmishes in the late 18th century in Armagh (which was almost equally divided among Protestant and Catholic tenants) which produced the Orange Order, an organization which stressed the common interests of all Protestants, and was used to challenge the alliance between the Presbyterian and Catholic middle classes coming about in the Society of United Irishmen which flourished briefly in the 1790s. For after William's victory in 1690 the temporary alliance between the Anglican ascendancy and the dissenters - notably the Presbyterians of Ulster - soon fell apart. The Presbyterian middle class were important in trade and increasingly in industry, and they eventually came to resent the restrictions which had been imposed on important sectors of Irish trade by the English government at the behest of their English rivals; and also their treatment as second-class citizens by the landowning Anglican minority. All «dissenters» (of whom the Presbyterians formed the large majority) were excluded from all civil and military office, from local government, and in effect from any share in political power. By 1641 the Irish economy had emerged from medieval underdevelopment characterized by exports of fish and hides, the unsophisticated harvest of its rivers, coastal fishing grounds, forests and domesticated herds of cattle and sheep. The first half of the 17th century had witnessed a rapid transition in Irish agricultural life. Exports of cattle grew rapidly, and wool exports increased too, overshadowing the previously important categories of fish and hides. By 1641 exports of butter, unimportant in the 16th century, were the third most important export. From a woodland society Ireland was emerging as an agricultural area with a large agricultural surplus; but this development was seriously interrupted by the war from 1641 to 1652. Plague, too, in 1650 had its effect: thousands died. War destroyed crops and cattle. Famine followed in 1652 which probably reduced the Irish population to 1,000,000. But after this the economy gradually recovered under the impetus of the new proprietors of the land introduced by the Cromwellian plantation. Exports of beef, cattle and sheep were of record proportions in the early 1660s. Ireland's insular position was relevant here, for it was in proximity to two expand62
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