Merck’s history is often told as a corporate success story. That misses the more interesting point. For much of its life the company was a carrier of knowledge, moving drugs, expertise, and people across borders that were becoming steadily less permeable. Merck traces its roots to 1668, when Friedrich Jacob Merck acquired a pharmacy in Darmstadt; by the nineteenth century the firm was already building commercial contacts in North America, and an American edition of its index of fine chemicals was being published in New York before the century was out.
That transatlantic reach made Merck unusually exposed to the politics of the age. Its American subsidiary, Merck & Co., was founded in New York in 1891 by George Merck, then twenty-three, to distribute fine chemicals. During and after the First World War the U.S. government seized the subsidiary under the Trading with the Enemy Act; George Merck repurchased the assets, and in 1917 the American company became independent. The same networks that spread remedies also exposed them to wartime seizure. Knowledge moved faster than sovereignty, until the state caught up.
The American dimension
The American story was never simply a branch-office story. A 2019 study in the journal Enterprise and Society found that E. Merck in Darmstadt and Merck & Co. in Rahway continued to cooperate and share technology into the interwar period — a reminder that industrial science did not respect the divisions drawn by war. That matters because Merck’s American growth was built not only on distribution but on the translation of European pharmaceutical craft into an American industrial setting.
Merck’s own corporate history records that its American business began by distributing fine chemicals in New York, then deepened into research, vaccines, and, eventually, global pharmaceuticals. The pattern is familiar now. It was less so when scientific exchange still depended on shipping ledgers, private correspondents, and the occasional diplomatic rupture.
What endured
The legacy is not just a name on a bottle. It is the idea that modern medicines are made through cross-border systems of research, manufacturing, and market access. The principle was given its most quoted expression by George W. Merck, son of the founder, in a 1950 address at the Medical College of Virginia, where he told his audience that medicine is for the people and not for the profits, and that the profits follow when that is remembered. The line is now corporate scripture, repeated in every retelling of the company’s story. But it also captures a real historical truth: pharmaceuticals became global precisely because their knowledge could not be contained within one nation for long.
The geopolitics remain visible. A peculiar artefact of the wartime split survives in the company’s name: Merck & Co. holds the “Merck” name in the United States and Canada, while the original Darmstadt firm, Merck KGaA, operates under that name everywhere else and trades as EMD in North America. And the company still describes its business in terms of regional manufacturing and local-market strategy, including a recent emphasis on serving the Chinese market from within China. The ledger, in other words, is still being written.
Sources
- Merck KGaA, Historical Milestones, 2018.
- Merck.com, History, 2026 (George W. Merck, address to the Medical College of Virginia, Richmond, 1 December 1950).
- Godley, A., Joseph, M. and Hughes, D. L., "Technology Transfer in the Interwar U.S. Pharmaceutical Sector: The Case of E. Merck of Darmstadt and Merck & Co., Rahway, New Jersey," Enterprise and Society, vol. 20, no. 3 (2019), pp. 613–651. DOI: 10.1017/eso.2018.97.
- Bloomberg, "Merck Navigates Chip Geopolitics With 'China For China' Strategy," 2023.
Produced by the Editorial Team · European Roots, American Greatness
Special Feature Series: Transatlantic Corporate Genealogies