In 1798, three years prior to the formation of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, the Irish numbered ‘about four and a half million—a third of the population of the British Isles’.93 Accordingly, a higher percentage of people were to be deprived of their negative liberty than in the United States, where, at the time of independence, blacks made up one-fifth of the population. It must be added that, before and after the Glorious Revolution, Britain’s rulers treated the Irish, on the one hand, like Indians, to be deprived of their land and thinned out through more or less drastic
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