The Java War of 1825-30, fought between Prince Diponegoro and the Dutch colonial government with its Javanese allies, ended Javanese armed resistance to Dutch rule and left at least 200,000 Javanese dead, most from disease and starvation rather than combat, alongside some 15,000 dead on the Dutch side. To pay for the war and for the Netherlands' fiscal crisis, Governor-General Johannes van den Bosch introduced the Cultuurstelsel or Cultivation System in 1830, requiring villages to devote a share of land and labour to sugar, coffee and indigo delivered to the colonial state at fixed prices, enforced through Javanese headmen and the colonial bureaucracy. The system generated over 800 million guilders for the Dutch treasury before its dismantling in the 1860s and 1870s, and Indonesian historiography calls it tanam paksa, forced cultivation. Its critics, including the Dutch official Eduard Douwes Dekker writing as Multatuli in Max Havelaar and the parliamentarian Baron van Hoevell, blamed it for the famines of the 1840s in Cirebon and of 1849-50 in Demak and Grobogan, in which colonial records show district populations collapsing through death and flight. Economic historians continue to disagree about how far the famines were caused by the system itself as against harvest failure, rice-market disruption and local abuses.
The Dutch colonial state defeated Prince Diponegoro's revolt and then imposed compulsory export-crop cultivation on the Javanese peasantry
Raffles' count of 1815 gave 4.6 million and is regarded as a substantial undercount; Boomgaard's revisions and the Dutch colonial censuses put Java at roughly 6 million around 1830, rising to about 16 million by 1870. The Cultivation System applied to the peasantry of the residencies under direct Dutch administration, the great majority of that population.
The lower figure is the standard estimate of Javanese deaths in the Java War itself, most from disease and starvation, as given in Dutch military and colonial accounts and accepted in Peter Carey's history of Diponegoro. The upper figure adds the deaths in the Cirebon and Demak-Grobogan famines of the 1840s under the Cultivation System, which colonial district returns imply were very large but which cannot be separated cleanly from flight and from ordinary mortality.
Dutch colonial critics of the system, notably Baron van Hoevell and the parliamentary inquiries of the 1850s and 1860s, documented compulsory labour and the famines that followed.
Indonesia