[1] He was born in Oran into a middle-class Jewish family who had moved to French Algeria for health reasons but returned to France when Hauser was four years old.

His 1905 book L'impérialisme américain predicted the decline of Europe and the dominance of the United States, while his 1915 Méthodes allemandes d'expansion économique analyzed the role played by German industry in the outbreak of World War I.

Henri and his elder brother Félix-Paul were born in Oran in French Algeria where the family had relocated to improve Zélia's health and where Auguste had a tailor shop.

He subsequently taught at the lycées of Pau and Poitiers before receiving his doctorate in 1892 from the Faculté des lettres de Paris (University of France).

During that year he established a section of the Ligue des droits de l'homme at Clermont-Ferrand and gave a series of public lectures attacking the conviction of Dreyfus for treason as "illegal".

[2] One of his more eclectic works from this period was his 1901 L'Or, a book on gold in all its aspects including its extraction, metallurgy, the regions in which it is mined, and its use in both industry and commerce.

Throughout his career Hauser's approach was a multidisciplinary one and emphasized the roles played by both economics and geography in historical scholarship, views expressed as early as his 1903 L'enseignement des sciences sociales and his influential 1906 essay "La Géographie humaine et l'histoire économique".

During World War I Hauser worked as an advisor to Étienne Clémentel, France's Minister of Commerce and later sat on the economic committee at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919.

In his preface to that edition James Laurence Laughlin wrote: I know of no other available authority who has so fully and so intelligently explained the methods by which Germany has gained her remarkable position in the markets of the world.

[14]After World War I ended, Hauser returned to his primary specialty, the history of the early modern period, but continued to publish on many contemporary historical, economic and geographical subjects.

According to den Boer, one of Hauser's finest historical works from this period was his 1933 La prépondérance espagnole (1559–1660) which he characterised as "rightly considered a masterly and original synthesis."

[17][2] Georges Dumas, an old friend from Hauser's student days at the École Normale invited him to Brazil in the 1930s to advise on the training of historians.

[20] Hauser retired from the University of Paris in 1936 at the age of 70 with Marc Bloch succeeding him in the chair of economic history, but he continued his scholarly work and publication in the ensuing years.

Hauser came out of retirement and moved with his family to Rennes in 1939 to cover a teaching post at the university left vacant when its lecturer was drafted.

After France's defeat by the Germans in June 1940, Bloch returned to Paris, but when the Vichy laws on the status of Jews were passed in October of that year, both he and Hauser were declared "undesirable professors".

[24] Hauser married Thérèse Franck on 3 September 1888 in a non-religious wedding ceremony, which drew disapproval from their Jewish families and from his Catholic classmates at the École Normale.

[2] Their daughter, Alice Hauser, became a bacteriologist at the main bacteriology laboratory in Dijon and was awarded the silver Médaille d'honneur des épidémies[c] by the French War Ministry in 1916.

[28][29] Hauser's account of his childhood and youth and his family's history appears in his unfinished memoirs, Souvenirs d'un vieux grand-père à sa petite fille (Memories of an Old Grandfather for his Granddaughter).

The book is a collection of papers delivered at a two-day international colloquium on the life and work of Hauser held in January 2003 at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.