Merck is the oldest pharmaceutical-chemical company in the world. It evolved from a pharmacy in Darmstadt, for which Friedrich Jacob Merck received the privilege in 1668, into a global corporation. This book tells its 350-year history for the first time in its entirety, based on all available sources and the latest research in corporate history. For a long time, family-owned companies were considered a thing of the past. The future seemed to belong to corporations with an anonymous shareholder structure. However, there are numerous successful counterexamples, such as Bosch, C&A, Bertelsmann, and Merck itself. How did the family manage to keep the company in their possession over 13 generations through all the political upheavals and historical crises, turning it into a globally leading science and technology company? Under this guiding question, four distinguished corporate historians narrate the fascinating story of Merck from 1668 to 2018, embedding it in the tumultuous course of world history.