“Conversion and Colonialism: Islam and Christianity in North Sulawesi, c. 1700-1900” PhD dissertation, Leiden University, 2018 A. C. Lopez Summary Conversion and colonialism: Islam and Christianity in north Sulawesi, c. 1700-1900 This dissertation deals with the roughly contemporaneous conversion to Islam and Christianity in the three sub-regions of north Sulawesi. In particular, it explains the causes of elite and mass conversions to Islam in Bolaang-Mongondow and to Protestant Christianity in Minahasa and Sangir-Talaud in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It devotes special attention to the nineteenth century transformations in the colonial political economy and their broader social and religious consequences in the region. It illustrates that notwithstanding local particularities, the mass conversions to Islam and Christianity in these areas shared a similar cause. This dissertation thus diverges from the existing scholarly literature on Indonesia that often views Christian and Islamic conversions as separate phenomena having distinct and divergent roots. This dissertation argues that the immediate impetus for mass conversions was the centralizing reforms of the Dutch colonial state in the nineteenth century. These reforms loosened traditional patron-client bonds and consequently provided non-elites with access to material wealth and prestigious social affiliations—notably, membership to a world religion— that had been exclusively for the ruling elite. In some cases, apical chiefs whose positions were strengthened by the colonial state, became invested in the promotion of religious conversion among the non-elites. This was a strategy of the apical chiefs to facilitate the centralizing of power in their realms. As differences in status decreased between subaltern chiefs and their subjects, the apical chiefs not only gained greater cultural legitimacy but also claimed political authority over the converted. By focusing on the political and economic aspects of conversion (and in particular, the role and motivations of the chiefly elite), this dissertation points to the inadequacy of some important conventional theories of conversion in the literature on Indonesia. For instance, what could be called as the “bottom-up theory” points to the widely shared desire to convert to a