Empire’s ghostly afterlives: from financial markets to creative industries

What do ghosts, empires, and financial capital have in common? In this episode of Cultural Economy in the Kitchen, Philip Roscoe and Addie McGowan speak with Clea Bourne, Paul Gilbert, and Eleanor Newbigin to explore how colonial legacies haunt contemporary financial systems and cultural policy. Clea and Paul unpack the “ghostly infrastructures” underpinning global finance, revealing how willed forgetfulness obscures the colonial histories embedded in today’s markets. Eleanor then turns to UK–India cultural and creative industries, showing how development narratives, soft power, and neoliberal agendas continue to reproduce hierarchy and extractive logics. Together, the conversation confronts the lingering spectres shaping political and economic life today.