[1] For much of its early history, Grace's main business was in South America, in maritime shipping, railroads, agriculture, and silver mining, with 30,000 employees in Peru.

In September 2021, Standard Industries acquired Grace (the Catalysts and Material Technologies business segments).

He went first to Peru to work as a ship chandler for the firm of Bryce and Company, to the merchantmen harvesting guano, used as a fertilizer and gunpowder ingredient due to its high levels of phosphorus and nitrogen.

Grace acquired and combined other companies to create and expand businesses such as Barilla Pasta, FAO Schwarz, Ingersoll-Rand, Roto-Rooter, Del Taco, and Cartavio Distilleries.

Grace pioneered genetic engineering at its Agricetus division in Wisconsin, and human gene therapy at its Aurigent Pharmaceuticals group.

The listed capital of $6 million did not include Grace Brothers & Co. Limited in London or its branches in San Francisco, Lima, and Callao, Peru, nor Valparaíso, Santiago, and Concepción, Chile.

To move cargo from Peru to North America and Europe, including guano and sugar, and noticing the need for other goods to be traded, William Grace founded a shipping division.

With no large ships for the transpacific operations, Grace sold the Pacific Mail, its registered name, and goodwill to Dollar.

After the war, the Grace line operated 23 ships totaling 188,000 gross tons, and 14 more on bareboat charters.

In 1960, the Grace Line, inspired by the pioneering efforts of Sea-Land Service, Matson Navigation, and Seatrain Lines, sought to begin containerizing its South American cargo operations by converting the conventional freighters Santa Eliana and Santa Leonor into fully cellular container ships.

The effort was stymied by the opposition of longshoremen in New York and Venezuela, and the ships were repeatedly laid up idle and were ultimately sold to the domestic container line Sea-Land Service in 1964.

Harold Logan, Grace's executive vice president, stated the company would join in governmental-level talks over compensation of expropriated American concerns.

The loss of Grace's properties in Peru began in 1969 when 25,000 acres of sugarcane plantations were taken over in agrarian reform.

Grace retained small mining operations producing copper, tin, and silver, in southern Peru, about 100 miles north of Juliaca.

On January 27, 1999, it announced it was moving its administrative staff to the Columbia office and closing the Boca Raton headquarters.

[40] In 2014, the company emerged from a 13-year bankruptcy case stemming from asbestos claims and immediately built a new 90,000 sq ft headquarters building on its 160-acre Columbia campus.

[43] The company has been involved in several controversial incidents of proven and alleged corporate crimes, including exposing workers and residents of an entire town to asbestos contamination in Libby[44] and Troy, Montana, water contamination (the basis of the book and film A Civil Action) in Woburn, Massachusetts, and an Acton, Massachusetts, Superfund site.

While Grace no longer makes asbestos or related products, at the time of its bankruptcy in 2001 it faced over 65,000 asbestos-related personal injury lawsuits involving over 129,000 claims.

[46] The company was trying to find a resolution through federal court-supervised reorganization in response to the quickly growing number of asbestos-related bodily injury claims.

[47] On September 19, 2008, Grace filed a revised plan of reorganization to the same court, jointly with the asbestos injury claimants.

In 2000, the EPO ruled in India's favour, but W. R. Grace appealed, claiming that prior art about the product had never been published in a scientific journal.