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Well in many ways what the Plantation did was simply to speed up processes which were already at work. Gaelic Ireland in the late-16th century was already in the process of being transformed into a set of new relationships where the Irish lords were becoming more like English landlords, and suddenly this speeds up enormously. The effect of this, of course, is to create this rather new society where all sorts of interesting experiments can be carried on - social and economic experiments. The implications of some of these, you know, existed right up until relatively recently in Ulster. But that the ideas which they introduced - the ideas of a market economy, the ideas of markets and fairs, the idea of landlords and tenants, the ideas of leases - really what it does is modernise Ulster society much, much faster than it otherwise would have. It introduces the English language, it introduces patterns of economic life which locks Ulster into a western-European society, so that Ulster becomes almost a world living on the edge of the old world, but yet having many of the features of colonial North America in the new world, so that in some ways it becomes neither kingdom nor colony but a rather strange mid-Atlantic polity.
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