I have read that the Cultuurstelsel was enacted sometimes in the mid-19th century to get Holland from the edge of bankrupcy which threatened after the separation of Belgium.
The Dutch forced the Javanese to grow sugar or indigo instead of rice which later led to massive famines and epidemics on the island. They also issues floods of new coins to pay for imports and thus extracted a huge inflation tax from the Javanese.
I guess that the bonds between Netherlands and Indonesia are strong until present day since the only Dutch product I personally use here in CZE is "Javaanse Jongens Tembacco" - 40g pack of tobacco
I just looked it up, it was designed and empowered in 1830, the very year that Belgium seceded.
It was indeed instituted to help the Dutch economy and public welfare, one of the reforms of our first properly-Dutch monarch, Willem I (a true paternal autocrat). The economy had been weak since the crises of the Napoleonic times (though it wasn't very strong before then either, it had been stagnant for most of the 18th century) and given the loss of Ceylon, South-Africa and now Belgium there was probably a clear need to somehow gain more income and revenues. It did succeed in that respect, though at a terrible price for the Indonesians.
If you look at the Cultuurstelsel on paper it wasn't actually too bad. Local farmers and rulers had to from then on use 20% of their land to grow goods desired for sale on the European market. In addition to it, local rulers got paid the so-called 'cultuurprocenten' for their domain's products and, as a stimulus, they even got paid more if they somehow managed to produce more than the expected amount.
Of course this alone led to massive exploitation of the farmers, in this case by their own rulers. Couple this with increasing corruption, arrogance and a rabid desire to line their own pockets amongst the Dutch administration the Cultuurstelses was horribly abused. Farmers were often forced to devote for example 25 or 30 percent of their most fertile lands to this production, sometimes probably even more.
Of course most of this went unreported in the 'colonial wilds', but great famine must have certainly been the result.
In the 1860's public awareness on the issue in the Netherlands did grow though, as Multatuli (Eduard Douwes-Dekker) wrote his literary masterpiece on the issue, and it was eventually abolished in the 1870's.
Given all this it is obvious that EL n00biachi is quite right, relations between the Netherlands and Indonesia are still low. Especially as we parted with war, as we desperately tried to stop the decolonization with force (it's actually quite ironic how we actually mobilized and decided to go to war so shortly after being ourselves liberated from the Germans).
The one attempt to maintain some form of political-economic contact was abolished by Indonesia just a few years after it's institution.
Some issues still remain. For example, the issue of when Indonesia became a separate state (we said 1949, they said 1945) was only solved in 2005. Also, as EL n00biachi already pointed out, there are still pro-Dutch 'Indonesians' living in the Netherlands, who still desire at least regional autonomy for their islands and are opposed to the central government on Java (and Sumatra).
We were not very nice colonial rulers at all.
This is of course not quite what the topic was about though, when it was first created. I'm afraid we're going off-topic.
