Although Irish scholars are correcting a traditional inclination to blame all woes on perfidious Albion, the impact of colonial domination – for better and for worse – was powerful. As England's first colony Ireland in the seventeenth century was coercively integrated into the core economy. The rebellious natives were dispossessed by post-Reformation (Protestant) English authorities so that by 1703 only 14 percent of the land was in native (Catholic) hands. In this period of colonial consolidation “a grim pattern was established, lasting into the twentieth century, whereby the density of the Irish rural population was in inverse proportion to the quality of the land on which it was settled.”

English rule was no unalloyed boon for the subject economy. The Cattle Acts of 1666 prohibited export of cattle to England, and were repealed when English interests changed. The Navigation Acts of 1679 forbade Irish trade with other colonies except via English merchant ships – which helps explain their otherwise odd lack of a maritime tradition. The English parliament banned Irish woollens exports in 1699. Irish breweries were forbidden in 1710 to import hops except from England, and glass manufacturing was crippled by legislation in 1746. Linen manufacture did not compete directly with English goods, and was encouraged in the Northeast. It was Ireland's misfortune to rival England in many economic areas.