Postwar New York

By the late 1940s, New York had become the world's biggest manufacturing centre. It had 40,000 factories, a million factory workers and a port which handled 150 million tons of freight goods a year.

The city inherited Paris's role as the centre of the art and fashion world. New York was a refuge for foreign artists fleeing war-battered Europe.

New York was a great international city and took on the role of the world's financial capital and the site of the world's two largest stock exchanges: the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ.