A province is an administrative division within a country or state. The term derives from the ancient Roman provincia, which was the major territorial and administrative unit of the Roman Empire's territorial possessions outside Italy. The term province has since been adopted by many countries. In some countries with no actual provinces, "the provinces" is a metaphorical term meaning "outside the capital city". While some provinces were produced artificially by colonial powers, others were formed around local groups with their own ethnic identities. Many have their own powers independent of central or federal authority, especially in Canada. In other countries, like China or France, provinces are the creation of central government, with very little autonomy.
Etymology The English word province is attested since about 1330 and derives from the 13th-century Old French province, which itself comes from the Latin word provincia, which referred to the sphere of authority of a magistrate, in particular, to a foreign territory. A popular etymology is from Latin pro- ("on behalf of") and vincere ("to triumph" or "to take control of"). Thus a "province" would be a territory or function that a Roman magistrate held control of on behalf of his government. In fact, the word province is an ancient term from public law, which means: "office belonging to a magistrate". This agrees with the Latin term's earlier usage as a generic term for a jurisdiction under Roman law.
History and culture
In France, the expression en province still means "outside the Paris region". Equivalent expressions are used in Peru (en provincias, "outside the city of Lima"), Mexico (la provincia, "lands outside Mexico City"), Romania (în provincie, "outside the Bucharest region"), Poland (prowincjonalny, "provincial"), Bulgaria (в провинцията, v provincijata, "in the provinces" and провинциален, provincialen, "provincial"), the Netherlands (uit de provincie, "from outside Amsterdam", or "from outside the Randstad"), and the Philippines (tagá-probinsiya, "from outside Metro Manila", sa probinsiya, "in the provinces", or "in the countryside"). Before the French Revolution, France comprised a variety of jurisdictions (built around the early Capetian royal demesne), some being considered "provinces", though the term was also used colloquially for territories as small as a manor (châtellenie). Most commonly referred to as "provinces", however, were the Grands Gouvernements, generally former medieval feudal principalities, or agglomerations of such. Today, the expression en province is regularly replaced in the media by the more politically correct en région, région now being the term officially used for the secondary level of government. In Italy, in provincia generally means "outside the biggest regional capitals" (like Rome, Milan, Naples, etc.). For the United Kingdom, use of the word is often pejorative, assuming a stereotype of the denizens of the provinces to be less culturally aware than those in the capital. In Mexico, while the term la provincia is commonly used to refer to areas outside Mexico City, it is increasingly viewed as pejorative by residents of other states. Mexico does not have provinces as administrative divisions, and the use of the term can imply a hierarchical or dismissive view of the rest of the country, reinforcing centralist attitudes and marginalizing regional identities. The historic European provinces—built up of many small regions, called pays by the French and "cantons" by the Swiss, each with a local cultural identity and focused upon a market town—have been depicted by Fernand Braudel as the optimum-size political unit in pre-industrial Early Modern Europe. He asks, "Was the province not its inhabitants' true 'fatherland'?" Even centrally-organized France, an early nation-state, could collapse into autonomous provincial worlds under pressure, as during the sustained crisis of the French Wars of Religion (1562–98). The British colonies in North America were often named provinces. Most (but not all) of the Thirteen Colonies that eventually formed the United States were called provinces. All declared themselves "states" when they became independent. The Connecticut Colony, the Delaware Colony, Rhode Island and the Colony of Virginia never used the title "province". The British colonies further north, which remained loyal to Britain and later confederated to form the original Canada, retained the title of "province" and are still known as such to the present day. To 19th and 20th-century historians, in Europe, centralized government was a sign of modernity and political maturity. In the late 20th century, as the European Union drew nation-states closer together, centripetal forces seemed simultaneously to move countries toward more flexible systems of more localized, provincial governing entities under the overall European Union umbrella. Spain after Francisco Franco has been a "State of Autonomies", formally unitary but in fact functioning as a federation of Autonomous Communities, each exercising different powers. While Serbia, the rump of former Yugoslavia, fought the separatists in the province of Kosovo, the United Kingdom, under the political principle of "devolution", produced (1998) local parliaments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. In ancient India, unlike the Mauryas, the Gupta Empire gave local areas a great deal of independence and divided the empire into 26 large provinces, styled as Bhukti, Pradesha and Bhoga.
Legal aspects
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