Introduction

Minahasa, the northeastern tip of the long-outstretched arm in North Sulawesi (fig.1), was widely recognized by the colonial regime as the most important region to the east of Java in the nineteenth century (Schouten 1998: 53-54).This recognition was made mainly because it was a center for the production of major export crops such as rice, coffee, and copra (dried kernel of coconuts), and also because of the large-scale conversion of its population to Christianity.These prominent characteristics of Minahasa, a part of the Manado Residency, will be explored in this dossier, adding new research to existing analyses regarding the background and the mutual relations of the economic and religious developments in question.Most attention will be paid to economic conditions, highlighting the remarkable development of cash-crop production.Minahasa had already been known for its abundant rice production since the early seventeenth century, and its rice exports increased from around 400 tons in the mid-eighteenth century to more than 1,600 tons in the early nineteenth century, as described in the first article in this dossier.The main cash crop during the nineteenth century was coffee; its exports increased from 253 tons in 1835 to 1,688 tons in 1856, amounting to 2.3% of the total coffee exports from the Netherlands East Indies (Clemens, Lindblad, Touwen 1992: 70).Even more spectacular was the advance in copra production, which would have its peak period only Atsushi OtA * 1.As the Netherlands East Indies provided about 41% of the world's copra exports in 1935, Minahasa -the largest single copra exporting region in this colony (Departement van Economische Zaken 1937: 5) -was thus one of the world's largest copra-producing regions.Fig. 1 -Minahasa and its five administrative divisions (afdeelingen) in 1840 (created by Taro Kamegamori, based on Henley (2005: 40), Thunderforest.com, and d-maps.com)