The collapse of the Dutch East India Company in 1799 left its debts to the Dutch state. A land tax under Herman Willem Daendels and a short British occupation raised revenue on paper but squeezed Javanese farmers who lived on rice rather than cash. The Padri War, the Java War of 1825 to 1830, and the Belgian Revolution drained the treasury further, so in 1830 Governor General Johannes van den Bosch introduced the cultuurstelsel, which Indonesian historians call tanam paksa, enforced planting. Villages owed 20 percent of their land to export crops such as sugar, indigo, and coffee, or 66 days of labor.

In practice farmers gave up far more, often the best irrigated plots, and travel passes tied them to their villages. Local middlemen earned commissions on crop volume, and the government paid in copper coins worth less than half their face value at a forced rate of two to one. The budget balanced by 1831 and the system at its peak supplied half of Dutch state revenue, while famine and epidemics in the 1840s spread from Cirebon into central Java and mortality rose as much as 30 percent.

• At its peak the system involved up to one million farmers.
• Writing in 1861, J.W.B. Money said the currency trick made Dutch loans worth double their amount in Java.
• Critics such as Multatuli exposed the abuses, but merchant lobbying for private plantations drove the change.
• The 1870 Sugar Law and Agrarian Law ended the formal system, and research estimates mortality would otherwise have run 20 percent higher.
• Forced labor continued as penal work building railways, bridges, and irrigation for private estates.