In the spring of 1616 observers at James I’s court were somewhat startled to learn that an Irish official holding a post below the rank of great office had been appointed lord deputy of Ireland. In the king’s name, English privy councillors announced that Oliver St John, former master of the ordnance in Ireland, had been chosen to succeed Arthur Chichester, the incumbent Irish governor. Preoccupied with notions of hierarchy, the royal court reacted with contempt and shock to the announcement. Edward Sherburne, agent to Dudley Carleton, England’s ambassador to the Hague, perhaps reflects best the contemporary attitude in his biting comment that such an unusual appointment could have only one possible explanation. St John was a distant kinsman of the rising favourite, George Villiers, and Sherburne noted with undertones of cynicism: ‘Sir Oliver St John made lord deputy of Ireland by Villiers’ influence whose power is so great “as what he will, shall be’”.

Throughout much of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries linen textile production made an important contribution, in terms of output, exports, employment and capital accumulation, to the economy of north-east Ireland. However, for a brief period of a few decades, from the 1780s to the 1830s, the dominance of linen was challenged by a mechanised cotton industry centred on the Belfast area producing both mill-spun yarn and hand- and machinewoven piece goods. This period witnessed a shift of local resources of capital and labour from linen into cotton and back into linen in the space of half a century.

The story of Belfast’s brief flirtation with cotton is a difficult one to put together. Both narrative and analysis are constrained by a lack of records, especially by a dearth of statistics on inputs and on output. The traditional view has been that the industry was made up of units of production which, smaller than their British rivals and lacking supplies of local coal, produced at an uncompetitive unit cost. Its relatively brief existence was sustained by a combination of war and protective tariffs and with their removal the cotton industry in Belfast, unable to compete with its rivals in Great Britain, quickly disappeared. The validity of this view has been challenged recently. It has been shown that at least for the 1830s when data are available horse power per establishment was not significantly lower in Belfast than for the United Kingdom as a whole; nor was the absence of local supplies of coal a major disadvantage given local wage costs. These revisions cast doubt on the notion that Belfast cotton spinning establishments were inherently uncompetitive. Not every observer is convinced however. Ollerenshaw in his essay on industry in nineteenth-century Ulster remains certain that the exit from cotton spinning was to a large extent forced and that wet spinning was a timely and fortuitous alternative. Similarly Cullen argues that the local industry was uniquely unable to withstand the depression of 1825 and after.

Though the Volunteers had an enormous impact on Irish politics in the years between their formation in the mid 1770s and their dissolution in 1793, there has been comparatively little historical investigation of this phenomenon. One important and problematical matter in need of resolution is the size of the Volunteer force. Contemporary estimates abound, but they are often more valuable for the insight they give into contemporary thinking on Volunteering than reliable guides to the number of Volunteers in Ireland at any given time. In the absence of registers or other schedules of the hundreds of corps that constituted the Volunteers, it is improbable that we shall ever be able to provide absolute answers to the question of just how numerous they were. We are not wholly bereft of documentation, however, and by combining the more trustworthy of contemporary calculations and such lists as exist it is possible to throw much light on the rise and decline of Volunteering in the 1770s and 1780s. One of the most important and most detailed of these lists is the ‘secret’ and little known ‘Return of the Volunteers with private observations’ which was compiled in the early winter of 1784–5 as Dublin Castle readied itself for an attempt to replace this independent and highly politicised paramilitary body with a compliant and non-political militia.