Metropole

A metropole is the country at the heart of an empire: the seat of political, cultural, and economic power that stretches across geographical space to control and influence territories outside domestic boundaries. The metropole played a significant role in the development of consumer culture: it exported [Page 966]Western industrialization and mercantile capitalism and was also the source of modern global commodity trades. On the one hand, the metropole was the main buyer of primary resources and commodities exported from the colonies. On the other hand, it was the source of a wide variety of manufactured goods, often made from those primary resources sourced from the empire, which were then profitably sold in the markets of the colonies. These economic influences—arguably at the root of contemporary ...