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 pharmacists 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.

Carsten Burhop is Professor of Constitutional, Social and Economic History at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn. Michael Kißener is Professor of Contemporary History at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz. Hermann Schäfer is Professor at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg and the founding president of the Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland in Bonn. Joachim Scholtyseck is Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms- Universität Bonn.