On one wintry night in February 2004, across the treacherous sandflats of Morecambe Bay in northwest England, dozens of Chinese cockle pickers were already hours into filling their buckets with heaps of bivalves. Their back-breaking toil would earn them a pittance of five pounds per 25-kilogram bag at the end of the day. Any other profit made from the lucrative trade would be pocketed by the local criminal agents, who trafficked the workers illegally from poverty-stricken provinces of China into the United Kingdom.