Alexander Morrison was born in 1978 in the Hague, the Netherlands, where his father was working as a foreign correspondent, and grew up in Moscow, Paris, Harare and Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was educated at Borrowdale Primary School, Harare, Sevenoaks School in Kent and at Oriel College, Oxford, where he read Modern History and won the Gibbs prize for the highest First-class degree in his year. He was elected to a seven-year Prize Fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, in 2000, and began the research for his doctoral thesis the following year, working in archives and libraries in Moscow, St Petersburg, Tashkent, Dushanbe and Delhi. He was awarded his D.Phil at Oxford in 2005, and in September 2007 took up the post of Lecturer in Imperial History at the University of Liverpool. Russian Rule in Samarkand is his first book.