Metropole
The
metropole was the name given to the
British metropolitan center of the
British Empire, i.e. the United Kingdom itself. This was even extended, such that
London became the metropole of the British Empire, insofar as its politicians and businessmen determined the economic, diplomatic, and military character of the rest of the Empire. By contrast, the
periphery was the rest of the Empire, outside the British Isles themselves.
The
historiography of metropole-periphery relations has traditionally been defined in terms of complete separation of the two with a distinctly one-way channel of communication; the metropole informed the periphery, but the periphery did not directly inform the metropole. More recent work, starting with that of
John Gallagher and
Ronald Robinson in the 1950s, has questioned this and, instead, has posited that the two were mutually constituitive, such that each formed simultaneously in relation to the other. In this interpretation, the economic
informal Empire of the periphery created formal Empire as surely as the metropole did.
In
French and
Portuguese, the
cognate word
métropole (Fr.) /
metrópole (Port.), designates the part of a country near or on the
European continent.
In the case of
France, this would mean France without its
overseas departments.
For
Portugal during the
Portuguese Empire period, it used to be common to designate Portugal (or the Portuguese capital city,
Lisbon) except its
colonies, the
Ultramar. Both terms,
metrópole and
ultramar, were frequently used until the mid-1970s when the Portuguese colonies in
Africa (now known as the
PALOP) achieved independence.
*
Metropolis
