He was born in 1780 in Ottoman ?zmir (Smyrna), the second son of Isaac Morier, a Swiss-born merchant, British by naturalisation, and a member of the London-based Levant Company, and Elizabeth Clara Van Lennep. After private education in England, he worked in his father's ?zmir business between 1799 and 1806.

Career in Iran

He first visited Iran in 1808 as secretary to Harford (later Sir Harford) Jones, a special British envoy to the Shah, publishing an account of his experiences in 1812 under the title A Journey through Iran, Armenia and Asia Minor to Constantinople in the years 1808 and 1809. In 1809 he accompanied the Iranian envoy to Britain, Mirza Abul Hasan, and in 1810 returned to Iran as Secretary of Embassy on the staff of Sir Gore Ouseley, first ambassador to Iran. He remained there as Chargé d'Affaires in 1814 until 1816 and after his return to England he published A Second Journey through Iran to Constantinople between the years 1810 and 1816.

Commissioner to Mexico

He married Harriet Fulke Greville in London in 1820 and between 1824 and 1826 he was special commissioner to Mexico negotiating the treaty with that country that was eventually ratified in 1827.

With his knowledge of Eastern life and manners he wrote several entertaining novels. The most popular of these was The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan (1824) and its sequel The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan in England (1828). There followed Zohrab the Hostage (1832), Ayesha the Maid of Kars (1834), and The Mirza (1841), all full of brilliant description, character-painting, and delicate satire, and several others of lesser quality.

Morier died at Brighton on 20 March 1849, his wife in London in 1858.

Operation Hajji Baba, a humanitarian airlift operation conducted in 1952 by the US Air Force, took its name from the Hajji Baba novels.