Between World War 1 and World War 2, the New York metropolitan region became the main region for the production of organic synthetic pharmaceuticals in the United States. The leaders in this area of specialization were subsidiaries of foreign—mostly German—companies which had established distribution networks in the 19th century and had begun manufacturing pharmaceuticals in the region at the turn of the century. By looking back to the mid-19th century, the author analyzes the relationships between the German professional and business immigrant community in New York (among them the Forty-Eighters), the development of the New York hinterland, and the success of the German-American pharmaceutical business establishment, in an effort to discern one possible explanation of the concentration of the pharmaceutical industry in New York metropolitan region.
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