Belfast, United Kingdom

The site of Belfast has been occupied since at least the Neolithic. The Giant's Ring, a 5,000-year-old henge, is located near the city, and remains of Iron Age hill forts can still be seen on the surrounding hills. At the beginning of the 14th century, Papal tax rolls recorded two churches: the "Chapel of Dundela" at Knock (Irish cnoc, meaning "hill") in the east, connected by some accounts to the 7th-century evangelist St. Colmcille,and, the "Chapel of the Ford", which may have been a successor to a much older parish church on the present Shankill (Seanchill, "Old Church") Road, dating back to the 9th, or possibly to St. Patrick in the mid 5th century.

In the early 13th century, the Normans established a settlement at the ford comprising a fort, a parish church (now St. George's), and a watermill. This fort became the original Belfast Castle. Seized in the 14th century by the O'Neills of Clandeboye, it was retaken, demolished, and rebuilt several times until, at the end of the 16th century, the Irish power was broken in scorched-earth Nine Years' War.

Conn O'Neill, the last Gaelic lord to command the Lagan Valley, is commemorated in Belfast by the Connswater river. The O'Neills' former stronghold overlooking Belfast is recalled in the name Castlereagh, from An Caisleán Riabhach meaning "the grey castle". Their stone inauguration chair was removed from the Castlereagh Hills and is on display in the Ulster Museum.

With a commission from King James VI, in 1613 Sir Arthur Chichester undertook the Plantation of Belfast and the surrounding area, building a new castle in what is now Castle Place, and attracting mainly English and Manx settlers. The subsequent arrival of Scottish Presbyterians embroiled Belfast in its only recorded siege: denounced from London by John Milton as "ungrateful and treacherous guests", in 1649 the newcomers were temporarily expelled by an English Parliamentarian army. In 1689, Catholic Jacobite forces, briefly in command of the town, abandoned it in advance of the landing at Carrickfergus of William, Prince of Orange, who proceeded through Belfast to his celebrated victory on 12 July 1690 at the Boyne.

Together with French Huguenots, the Scots introduced the production of linen, a flax-spinning industry that in the 18th century carried Belfast trade to the Americas. Fortunes were made carrying rough linen clothing and salted provisions to the slave plantations of the West Indies; sugar and rum to Baltimore and New York City; and for the return to Belfast flaxseed and tobacco from the colonies.

From the 1760s, profits from the trade financed improvements in the town's commercial infrastructure, including the Lagan Canal, new docks and quays, and the construction of the White Linen Hall which together attracted to Belfast the linen trade that had formerly gone through Dublin. Abolitionist sentiment, however, defeated the proposal of the greatest of the merchant houses, Cunningham and Greg, in 1786 to commission ships for the Middle Passage.As "Dissenters" from the established Anglican church (with its episcopacy and ritual), Presbyterians were conscious of sharing, if only in part, the disabilities of Ireland's dispossessed Roman Catholic majority; and of being denied representation in the Irish Parliament. Belfast's two MPs remained nominees of the Chichesters (Marquesses of Donegall). With their emigrant kinsmen in America, the region's Presbyterians were to share a growing disaffection from the Crown.

When early in the American War of Independence, Belfast Lough was raided by the privateer John Paul Jones, the townspeople assembled their own Volunteer militia. Formed ostensibly for defence of the Kingdom, Volunteer corps were soon pressing their own protest against "taxation without representation". Further emboldened by the French Revolution, a more radical element in the town, the Society of United Irishmen, called for Catholic emancipation and a representative national government. In hopes of French assistance, in 1798 the Society organised a republican insurrection. The rebel tradesmen and tenant farmers were defeated north of the town at the Battle of Antrim and to the south at the Battle of Ballynahinch.

Britain seized on the rebellion to abolish the Irish Parliament, unlamented in Belfast, and to incorporate Ireland in a United Kingdom. In 1832, British parliamentary reform permitted the town its first electoral contest – an occasion for an early and lethal sectarian riot.

While other Irish towns experienced a loss of manufacturing, Belfast underwent rapid industrial expansion from the 1820s. After a cotton boom and bust, the town emerged as the global leader in the production of linen goods (mill, and finishing, work largely employing women and children), winning the moniker "Linenopolis". Shipbuilding led the development of heavier industry.