The Metropole was the name given to the English metropolitan center of the British Empire, i.e., England itself, and in some contexts, specifically London or the London financial district and its small number of corporate and personal constituents who defined the cultural, financial, military, and political character of the Empire as a whole. Contrast this with the Periphery, which was essentially the rest of the Empire outside of England itself.

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. Recent work has rejected this and instead has posited that the two were mutually constituitive, so that each formed simultaneously in relation to the other.