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.

See also

• Metropolis

Colonialism | Empires

Metropole | Metropool