The name comes from the Germanic word Hasaluth, meaning a place of hazel trees. The town was founded around the 7th century on the Helbeek, a tributary of the Demer river, and first appeared in a document in 1165. In 1232 Arnold IV, Count of Loon, gave Hasselt the same freedoms the citizens of Liege enjoyed - a charter that made the difference between a market village and a self-governing town. The County of Loon was absorbed by the Prince-Bishopric of Liege in 1366 and stayed under bishop's rule until France annexed the whole region in 1794. When the Kingdom of the Netherlands divided Limburg between Belgian and Dutch halves in 1839, Hasselt became the provisional capital of the Belgian side. The provisional arrangement turned out to be permanent. The medieval Refuge of Herkenrode Abbey, dated 1542, still stands in the center as the oldest civic building. Two ring roads now wrap the carfree old town: the outer ring keeps cars out of the residential quarters, the inner ring out of the shopping streets.

The city sells itself as the Capital of Taste, and the case is well-made. The National Jenever Museum occupies a former distillery; on the third weekend of every October, the Hasselt Jenever Festival fills the streets, the Borrelmanneke fountain on Maastrichterstraat is temporarily plumbed to pour jenever instead of water, and waiters race through the center carrying trays of glasses without spilling. Hasselt also produces its own kind of speculaas - thicker than the spice biscuits eaten elsewhere in Belgium, less heavily spiced, with a crisp shell and a soft doughy interior. Bakers have been making them in this town since the 14th century. Tradition pairs them with chilled jenever. Speculaas was once baked only for Saint Nicholas Day in December; since the Second World War it has been sold year-round. The Fashion Museum, in the former Grauwzustersklooster convent, traces the trade that built another part of the city's reputation.

In 1963, a team of Belgian and Dutch engineers led by Lou Ottens at the Philips factory in Hasselt invented the Compact Cassette and its accompanying recorder. The format conquered the world for the next three decades - in living rooms, in cars, in personal stereos, in the mixtapes that became the way an entire generation discovered music. In 1983, a separate team of engineers at the same Philips site developed one of the first compact disc players, accelerating the transition that would eventually retire the very cassette they had earlier invented. The Philips site is now the Corda Campus, an innovation district housing 5,000 people in 250 companies across 9 acres, with plans to grow to 7,500 jobs in 350 companies by 2030. Cegeka, the European IT consultancy, runs out of Hasselt and turns over 744 million euros a year. The Jessa Hospital, with 3,000 employees across two health campuses and a logistics center, remains the city's largest single employer.

In 1997 Hasselt did something no other Belgian city had ever tried: it made every municipal bus free. Within nine years, public transport usage had risen by between 800 and 900 percent over pre-zero-fare levels. People who had owned cars left them at home; people who could not afford cars suddenly had reliable mobility. The Belgian press began describing Hasselt identity cards as "like gold," because of what they unlocked. The experiment lasted until 2013, when subsidies were cut and the city could no longer pay the operator's growing invoice. A 60-cent fare was reintroduced for adults, though young people under 19 still ride free. The cross-border tram line to Maastricht that was supposed to follow has been repeatedly delayed - over 20 million euros spent without major construction - and is now being reimagined as an electric trambus. Hasselt has not given up on the idea of moving people without making them buy a ticket; it has only paused.

Max Verstappen was born in Hasselt on 30 September 1997 - son of a Dutch Formula One driver and a Belgian karting champion, raised in a household where the kitchen table doubled as a race strategy room. He went on to win four consecutive Formula One World Drivers' Championships beginning in 2021. He is not the only motorsport name from the city: Anthony Kumpen and the brothers Laurens and Dries Vanthoor all came from here. Hasselt's other claims on global fame include Willy Claes, the politician who served as Secretary General of NATO, the singer-songwriter Axelle Red, and Francis Rombouts, who in 1679 became mayor of New York City - which had still been Dutch until just fifteen years earlier. The Kiewit Airfield on the city's northern edge opened in 1909, only six years after the Wright brothers first flew, and is among the oldest airfields anywhere in the world. The Japanese gardens at Kiewit are the largest in Europe. The city that escaped the jenever ban has kept escaping the obvious for over four hundred years.