Morier was the second son of a Swiss father who had become a naturalized British subject and moved to Smyrna (Izmir) where he worked for the Levant Company, later rising to become British consul-general in Istanbul. James was born in Smyrna but educated at Harrow entering the diplomatic service as secretary to Harford Jones' mission to Persia in 1808. After a preliminary treaty had been agreed Morier accompanied the Persian ambassador Mirza Abul Hasan to London where he acted as his guide through London society. Morier returned to Persia in 1811 in the role of secretary to the new British ambassador Sir Gore Ouseley, who Morier replaced briefly in 1814 before the embassy was closed. After a short mission to Mexico in 1815 Morier gave up diplomacy and concentrated on writing. He wrote up the Harford Jones' mission in A Journey through Persia, Armenia and Asia Minor (1812), published a sequel book of travel in Persia in 1818, and brought out his hugely successful picaresque novel, The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan in 1824. This too required a sequel: The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan in England (1824), a satire in the tradition of Montesquieu's Persian Letters. Further novels with oriental settings followed. Morier put his Persian experiences into both his travel works and his fiction, but Hasan Javardi is probably right that ‘without noticing, [the] reader [of Hajji Baba] learns more about the Persians than he would from a travel book’, although he also contends that Morier's ‘obsession with the vices of the Orient produces a decidedly unbalanced portrayal of the Persian character’ (Javardi 2005: 124, 129).