Ireland’s Easter Rising

British rule over Ireland long predates the concept of a British state.

In the 1160s, Anglo-Norman explorers looking for land to settle cross the hundred miles of water between the southwestern tip of Wales to what is now Ireland's County Wexford.

With the backing of the English king, Henry II, they gain a foothold and establish control in the region around Dublin.

In time, the region becomes known as The Pale, named after the palace stakes used to demarcate boundaries.

But the native Gaelic chieftains still hold most rural areas in a quasi-feudal system of peasants working for landowners.

The Tudor era brings deeper change.

In the 16th century, King Henry VIII sets his sights on conquest of the whole island.

A man who tends to get what he wants, by 1541 Henry is King of Ireland.

Gaelic chieftains are forced to surrender what remains of their estates to their new sovereign, who will grant them back the land on the condition that they acknowledge his supremacy.

During what is known as his dissolution of the monasteries, he seizes church land and property in Ireland as well as at home.

But during the reign of his Protestant daughter, Elizabeth, and especially her successor, James I, land is also confiscated from wealthy Catholic individuals and awarded instead to English and Scottish aristocrats and investors.

With the British Crown now effectively in control of the island, thousands of Protestant settlers from England and Scotland relocate across the water and change the cultural landscape.

Dr. Diarmuid Ferriter is professor of modern Irish history at University College Dublin.

Colonization is central to the Irish experience, and it defines Ireland in so many different ways, and the whole question of what it does to power relations within Ireland.

People who arrive newly to Ireland, those who begin to mingle and mix with the natives, but you also have the history there of the dispossession of the natives, particularly when there are those English who are rewarded with land in Ireland.

There is also frequent conflict, but there are also those, of course, who have built their identities and their loyalties on the connection with England.

Tensions over land, religion, and power persist through the centuries.

Catholicism becomes aligned with Irish nationalist identity as a point of defiance against the Protestant English Crown, one of many dividing lines that will run through the Irish story.

In the 17th century, the politician and military leader Oliver Cromwell brings about the abolition of the English monarchy.

With the execution of King Charles I in 1649, hundreds of royal supporters flee the violence in England and regroup in Ireland.

Recognizing their continued existence as a threat, later that year Cromwell launches an invasion with the intention of destabilizing royalist opposition and seizing Catholic property.

Soon, a Protestant minority of only 20% of the population controls two-thirds of the land.

As many as half a million Irish are killed by warfare, famine, and disease during Cromwell's campaign.

It creates a lasting cultural shift, too, with English becoming the language of business and Gaelic associated with the peasant class.

These waves of imperialist settlement and suppression are known as the Plantations.