Merck is the oldest pharmaceutical-chemical company in the world. It developed into a global
corporation from a Darmstadt pharmacy that Jacob Friedrich Merck received the pharmacist's
license for in 1668. This book tells the 350-year history of the company for the first time in
its entirety and on the basis of all the available sources as well as the newest research in
business history. For a long time family-owned companies were regarded as a dying breed. The
future seemed to belong to jointstock companies with an anonymous stockholder structure. Yet
there are numerous successful counterexamples in Germany such as Bosch C&A and Bertelsmann.
Merck too counts among them. How did the Merck family manage to keep the company in its
possession for 13 generations through all the political ruptures and historical crises and turn
it into a global leader among science and technology firms? With this as their central question
four acclaimed historians recount the fascinating history of the Merck company between 1668 and
2018 embedding it in the eventful course of world history.
