The Sri Lankan independence movement was a peaceful political movement which was aimed at achieving independence and self-rule for the country of Sri Lanka, then British Ceylon, from the British Empire. The switch of powers was generally known as peaceful transfer of power from the British administration to Ceylon representatives, a phrase that implies considerable continuity with a colonial era that lasted 400 years. It was initiated around the turn of the 20th century and led mostly by the educated middle class. It succeeded when, on 4 February 1948, Ceylon was granted independence as the Dominion of Ceylon. Dominion status within the British Commonwealth was retained for the next 24 years until 22 May 1972 when it became a republic and was renamed the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka.

The British were dominant in Asia after the Battle of Assaye; following the Battle of Waterloo, the British Empire became more influential. Its prestige was only briefly dented by setbacks in India, Afghanistan and South Africa. It was virtually unchallenged until 1914. The British were very powerful during their rule in Sri Lanka and left more of a lasting impact than any other power.

The formation of the Batavian Republic in the Netherlands as an ally and of the French Directory, led to a British attack on Ceylon in 1795 as part of Britain's war against the French Republic. The Kandyan Kingdom collaborated with the British expeditionary forces against the Dutch, as it had with the Dutch against the Portuguese.

Once the Dutch had been evicted, their sovereignty ceded by the Treaty of Amiens and subsequent revolts in the low-country suppressed, the British began planning to capture the Kandyan Kingdom. The 1803 and 1804 invasions of the Kandyan provinces in the 1st Kandyan War were defeated by the Kandyan Sinhalese forces. In 1815, the British fomented a revolt by the Kandyan Sinhalese aristocracy against the last Kandyan monarch and marched into uplands to depose him in the 2nd Kandyan War.

The struggle against the colonial power began in 1817 with the Uva Rebellion when the same aristocracy rose against British rule in a rebellion in which their villagers participated. They were defeated by the British. An attempt at rebellion sparked again briefly in 1830. The Kandy and Sinhalese peasantry were stripped of their lands by the Crown Lands (Encroachments) Ordinance No. 12 of 1840 (sometimes called the Crown Lands Ordinance or the Waste Lands Ordinance), a modern enclosure movement and reduced to penury.

In 1848 the abortive Matale Rebellion, led by Hennedige Francisco Fernando (Puran Appu) and Gongalegoda Banda was the first transitional step towards abandoning the feudal form of revolt, being fundamentally a peasant revolt. The masses were without the leadership of their native King (deposed in 1815) or their chiefs (either crushed after the Uva Rebellion or collaborating with the colonial power). The leadership passed for the first time in the Kandyan provinces into the hands of ordinary people, non-aristocrats. The leaders were yeomen-artisans, resembling the Levellers in England's Civil War period and mechanics such as Paul Revere and Tom Paine who were at the heart of the American Revolution. However, in the words of Colvin R. de Silva, 'it had leaders but no leadership. The old feudalists were crushed and powerless. No new class capable of leading the struggle and heading it towards power had yet arisen.'

Agriculture was the main source of revenue for the country and foreign exchanges. The land in Sri Lanka is very important because it has led to many different wars among different countries. In the 1830s, coffee was introduced into Sri Lanka, a crop which flourishes in high altitudes, and grown on the land taken from the peasants. The principal impetus to this development of capitalist production in Sri Lanka was the decline in coffee production in the West Indies, following the abolition of slavery there.

However, the dispossessed peasantry was not employed on the plantations: The Kandyan Sinhalese villagers refused to abandon their traditional subsistence holdings and become wage-workers in the harsh conditions that prevailed on these new estates, despite the pressure exerted by the colonial government. The British therefore had to draw on its reserve army of labour in India, to man the plantations in its lucrative new colony to the south. Through the Indian indenture system, hundreds of thousands of Tamil "coolies" from southern India were transported into Sri Lanka to work on European-owned cash crop plantations.