The richness of Nicola Verdon’s new history of farmwork in modern England lies in the wide range of workers she considers and the success of her mission to “place the voice of the worker back into the analysis” (15). For instance, in examining dairy work in the interwar years, she presents on one page the examples of Fred Kitchen, a former farm servant, who balanced the monotony of milking thirty- five to forty cows by hand twice a day with the experience of delivering milk to wealthy households in south- west Sheffield; the wives of farm laborers in Cheshire villages who “turned out as a matter of course” to milk twice a day in order to earn extra money but also because it was expected by their husbands’ employers; and Tony Harman, who ran a small farm in Buckinghamshire with eighteen cows and who struggled with a new milking machine...

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