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 consumer culture—are inseparable from other forms of power.

Exemplary metropoles include imperial Rome prior to the age of European colonization initiated in the mid-fifteenth century and Spain, France, and Britain thereafter (the status of America as the center of a contemporary “empire” is the subject of some debate). The characteristics of the metropole are the possession of political, cultural, and economic power, be it in the shape of strong military resources, such as armies and navies, which ease invasion and takeover; advanced technologies facilitating a command over space and time through transport and communications; or dominant ideological, linguistic, or religious beliefs that shore up and justify the imperial mentality. These resources are put to use to influence and control nondomestic territories in such a way as to benefit the metropole.

The term metropole should be distinguished from metropolis. Although the former is rooted in the latter and in antiquity metropolis also referred to the originating city of a colony, the terms are by no means interchangeable. Due to the rise of the nation-state and imperialism, metropole refers to the home country in its entirety. A metropolis is a city of great size and influence, and in the colonial context, this might refer to a large or powerful city in the metropole. In her study of the dialectic between the practices of English missionaries in Jamaica and slavery-abolitionist groups in Birmingham in the mid-nineteenth century, Catherine Hall not only refers to the latter as “the midland metropolis” but also distinguishes metropole as a term used to refer to Britain as “the mother country.” Metropolitan is an adjective that can be used to describe the qualities or culture of either a metropole or a metropolis.

The records of history are testaments to the influence of a metropole on its empire. Those territories and societies subjected to the attentions of metropolitan powers, from the earliest stages of seafaring exploration and mercantile capitalism to imperial expansion and colonization proper, experienced violent plunder in many guises. The legacy of enforced labor policies enacted and supported by metropolitan powers, whether slavery in the Caribbean and Americas or indentured workforces across the south and east of Africa and in Asia, endures in the cultures and societies of Brazil, America, South Africa, Sri Lanka, and many other countries. Linked to this and equally significant to the experience of colonization was the way in which metropoles would treat colonies as both sources of raw materials and markets for manufactured goods. In the case of Britain, arguably its entire economic power rested on the enforced “symbiosis” between primary producers in the colonies and British manufacturers (Hobsbawm 1987, 39–40). The metropolitan demand for various primary products often led to the dependent economy developing in such a way as to rely entirely on the production of one resource, thus creating “banana” or “coffee republics” (Hobsbawm 1987, 50). Peripheral countries survived economically by exporting primary produce to metropoles (and thus had no incentive to industrialize). In 1860, it is estimated that “half of all exports from Asia, Africa and Latin America had been sent to one country, Great Britain” (Hobsbawm 1987, 52). The import of these primary products and the rapid technological advances of the Industrial Revolution allowed Britain to rapidly develop leading expertise in the manufacture of a wide variety of commodities such as combustion engines, guns, forks, buttons and hooks, textiles, saucepans, bells, and locks and keys. Many of these goods “had their origins in the workshops of Birmingham” (and other metropolises), and being required the world over, especially by metropolitan settlers, the colonies “provided a particularly significant market” (Hall 2002, 271). In economic terms, and with direct bearing on the rise of modernist consumerism, the metropole must then be defined as both voracious importer of primary products and exporter of manufactured goods. Thus, especially in the case of Britain, the metropole is structurally linked with the colony in an economic relationship in which both are dependent but in which the benefits accrue primarily to the former.

...