Financial centre of the 19th century. After 1870, Berlin and New York grew to become major financial centres mainly serving their national economies. An array of smaller international financial centers found market niches, such as Amsterdam, Brussels, Zurich, and Geneva. London remained the leading international financial center in the four decades leading up to World War I. Since then, London and New York have developed leading positions in different activities and some non-Western financial centres have grown in prominence, notably Tokyo, Hong Kong and Singapore. In Asia, Tokyo emerged as a major financial centre in the 1980s as the Japanese economy became
Financial centre financial centre. As Richard Sylla (2015) noted, "In modern history, several nations had what some of us call financial revolutions. These can be thought of as creating in a short period of time all the key components of a modern financial system. The first was the Dutch Republic four centuries ago." Amsterdam – unlike its predecessors such as Bruges, Antwerp, Genoa, and Venice – controlled crucial resources and markets directly, sending its fleets to all quarters of the world. During their Golden Age, the Dutch were responsible for three major institutional innovations in economic, financial and business history of the