The
metropole, from the Greek Metropolis 'mother city' (polis being a city state, hence also used for any colonizing 'mother country'; in ecclesiastical languages an archbishopric having precedence over the suffragans in its ecclesiastical province) 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.
Metropole and periphery
The
historiography of British 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. Hence, the British Empire was constituted by the formal control of territories, by direct governance of foreign lands, instigated by the metropole.
[Webster (2006), p. 70]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.
Gallagher and Robinson were
socialists, observing the rise of economic power of the
United States in the developing world at a time when the African colonies British Empire was being granted independence, and theorised that both British and American 'empires' were similarly developed.
Within Gallagher, Stevenson and Robinson's theory of 'free trade imperialism', the use of
soft power, primarily through the employment of British
capital, allowed the United Kingdom to extract concessions, primarily
free trade for British manufactured goods, just as readily as if they had engaged in a costly military occupation of the territories. In this interpretation, the economic
informal Empire of the periphery created formal Empire as surely as the metropole did.
Other empires
Such
cognate words as
métropole (
French) and
metrópole (
Portuguese) designate the main part of a country, usually on the
European continent, as opposed to its
colonial possessions and/or overseas territories:
See also
Footnotes
