Britain engineered Irish partition on a sectarian headcount basis.

Evidence

Historically, the creation of a network of urban settlements (alongside land appropriation) has been central to Britain’s imperial and settler colonizing project in Ireland. This project, reiterated in many parts of the British Empire, involved selectively co-opting and often consolidating ethno-religious groups. The partition of Ireland in 1920–21 was an imperial arbitration of the so-called Irish Question. It marked the failure (or the reluctance) of British imperial nationalism, after the Act of Union (1801), to assimilate the whole island population to British citizenship. Irish anti-imperial nationalism, on the other hand, was unable to overcome British and Unionist opposition to Irish independence in Northern Ireland. The outcome was two new asymmetrical political jurisdictions centered on Dublin and Belfast, respectively. An alliance of Unionist and British imperial elites carved out a new political unit within the UK state, based on a sectarian headcount aimed at giving Protestants a “permanent” two-to-one majority. Its urban lynchpin was the Protestant and Unionist city of Belfast – the only major industrial center on the island. — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized, 2220

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Partition institutionalized settler-native religious antagonism into a local ethnocratic jurisdiction. — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 2221; Britain drew the Partition border hastily with little regard for human lives

Broader Connections

• Britain drew the Partition border hastily with little regard for human lives #corroborates (0.82)