Producers on Java are no longer compelled…
1870 CE
Dutch businessmen set up large, profitable plantations.
Dutch finances had been severely affected by the cost of the Java and Padri Wars, despite increasing returns from the Dutch system of land tax, and the Dutch loss of Belgium in 1830 had brought the Netherlands to the brink of bankruptcy.
In 1830, a new Governor-General, Johannes van den Bosch, had been appointed to make the Indies pay their way through Dutch exploitation of its resources.
With the Dutch achieving political domination throughout Java for the first time in 1830, it had become possible to introduce an agricultural policy of government-controlled forced cultivation
Termed cultuurstelsel (cultivation system) in Dutch and tanam paksa (forced plantation) in Indonesian, farmers had been required to deliver, as a form of tax, fixed amounts of specified crops, such as sugar or coffee.
Much of Java has become a Dutch plantation and revenues have risen continually through the nineteenth century, which have been reinvested into the Netherlands to save it from bankruptcy.
Between 1830 and 1870, one billion guilders have been taken from Indonesia, on average making up twenty-five per cent of the annual Dutch government budget.
The Cultivation System, however, has brought much economic hardship to Javanese peasants, who had suffered famine and epidemics in the 1840s.
Critical public opinion in the Netherlands leads to much of the Cultivation System's excesses being eliminated under the agrarian reforms of the "Liberal Period".
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