The present-day partition of Ireland into the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland can be seen to have descended directly from the settlement patterns of the Plantations of the 17th century and colonisation. These led to various uprising and rebellions by the Irish people to reclaim their land and rights. The large Protestant population in Ulster preferred to remain as part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland as opposed to the rest of the country, where the Catholic majority favoured independence. In 1922, Unionists held the majority in four of the nine counties of Ulster. Consequently, following Civil War and a War of Independence, the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, these four counties – and two others in which they formed a sizeable minority of nearly half the population – remained in the United Kingdom to form Northern Ireland. This new state, born under threat of war from the British government, contained a sizeable Catholic minority, many of whom identified as descendants of those dispossessed in the Plantations. The Troubles in Northern Ireland in many respects are a continuation of the conflict arising from the land confiscations and other injustices during the colonisation and plantations period.