Twentieth-century Marxist historians blamed the manorial economy based on serf labour for pauperizing the masses and undermining the towns, yet the Polish economy was not unique in that respect.
A minority of rich peasants lived amid struggling smallholders hard-pressed by feudal lords who maximized their profits by increasing labour and tax burdens (the period has been called a "second serfdom"), and in the cities an upper crust of wealthy merchants and landed aristocrats faced a proletariat, whole sections of which were pauperized by the end of the century.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, however, the social institutions of Pietism, the Inner Mission, and European revival movements inspired social concern for the masses of people pauperized and proletarianized by industrialism.
Uprooted and pauperized, he faced mortal danger three times over, fleeing the Bolsheviks in 1917, fleeing Nazi Berlin in 1937, and fleeing the Wehrmacht in France in 1940.
"It's the creeping realization that more and more people are being marginalized and pauperized and that, increasingly, life is more difficult," said Rami Khouri, director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut.
Nicholas Hytner's splendid, modern dress production of "Timon of Athens," at the Royal National Theatre (and broadcast worldwide on NT Live), made thrilling connections with Timon the deep-pocketed sugar daddy whose mortgage crisis pauperizes him and turns him from benefactor to misanthrope and the fragility of the contemporary British economy and its ruling élite.
It went on, "We pronounce the evil military despotism, which is impoverishing and pauperizing our people of all walks, including the clergy, as the common enemy of all our citizens".
It jails its critics, dragoons townspeople into forced labor and keeps order through fear while pauperizing a potentially thriving nation through economic incompetence.
"The entire Northeast was environmentally pauperized by unregulated hunting and egg collecting".
