country governors of british ceylon
The Governor of Ceylon was an official who ruled British Ceylon during the British colonial period between 1798 and 1948 . Upon the end of British rule and the creation of Dominion of Ceylon in 1948 , this office was replaced by the Governor - General , who represented the British Monarch and not the Government of the United Kingdom as did the Governor . The office of Governor - General was itself abolished in 1972 and replaced by the post of President when ___MASK90___ became a Republic . A Crown colony , also known in the 17th century as royal colony and since 2002 known as British Overseas Territories , was a type of colonial administration of the overseas territories of the ___MASK61___ . Kingdom of Kandy was an independent monarchy of the island of Lanka , located in the central and eastern portion of the island . It was founded in the late 15th century and endured until the early 19th century . Initially a client kingdom of the Kingdom of Kotte , Kandy gradually established itself as an independent force during the tumultuous 16th and 17th centuries , allying at various times with the Jaffna Kingdom , the Madurai Nayak Dynasty of South ___MASK12___ , Sitawaka , the Portuguese and the Dutch to ensure its survival . From the 1590s , it was the sole independent native polity on the island of ___MASK90___ , and through a combination of hit - and - run tactics and diplomacy kept European colonial forces at bay , before finally succumbing to final , British colonial rule in 1818 . The kingdom was absorbed into the ___MASK61___ as a protectorate following the Kandyan Convention of 1815 , and definitively lost its autonomy following the Uva Rebellion of 1817 . British Ceylon ( ___MASK95___ : , " Britanya Lankava "; Tamil :               , " Birithaniya Ilangai "), known contemporaneously as Ceylon , was a British Crown colony between 1802 and 1948 . At first the area it covered did not include the Kingdom of Kandy , which was a protectorate from 1815 , but from 1817 to 1948 the British possessions included the whole island of Ceylon , now the nation of Sri Lanka . ___MASK90___ ( or ; Sinhalese :         ', Tamil :     " Ilakai "), officially the Democratic Socialist Republic of ___MASK90___ ( formerly known as Ceylon ), is an island country in South Asia near south - east India . ___MASK90___ has maritime borders with India to the northwest and the ___MASK21___ to the southwest .