Forthcoming in Wilkie, A, Savransky, M. & Rosengarten, M. (Eds.), Speculative research: The lure of possible futures, London: Routledge. 1 Retrocasting: Speculating about the origins of money Joe Deville How did money become money? This simple question has aroused intense debate amongst a group of thinkers interested in the role that money plays in contemporary social and economic life. The problem is that the answers are lost in the mists of deep human time. No one really knows. This has not always, however, been seen as an insurmountable obstacle. It’s just that overcoming it has involved a considerable amount of speculation. This is speculation that is interested in how to connect an ultimately unknowable time and place to the present, not in relation to uncertain futures, but uncertain pasts—not forecasting but what I call ‘retrocasting’. Acts of monetary retrocasting are given force by the drive (the need? the desire? the pull of a lure?) to pin down what exactly money is, and what it does for us, as societies, as economies. They are, following Dick Bryan and Michael Rafferty, acts of ontological decomposition and recomposition, breaking down money into sets of constituent parts (in each case, an act itself predicated on understanding money as singular and sharing consistent features), to be then recombined ‘to produce a credible explanation of a (often ahistorical) universal money’ (2016: 28). What usually fails to be recognised in such practices, however, are the ways in which analysts themselves become inserted into these newly de- and recomposed monies. i They, their explanations, their propositions, their speculations, become part of the glue that binds together the newly assembled monetary object. In search of a way through such debates, one capable of recognising the role of the analyst in challenging and reinforcing monetary ontologies of various kinds, the chapter begins by outlining three retrocasting activities. The first is associated with mainstream economic thinking, the second with heterodox economics, with the third informed by a hybrid of sociological reasoning and a neglected strand within economic theory. As we will see, across these three accounts, the degree to which retrocasting is subject to empirical and theoretical scrutiny can vary. Sometimes, it is a form of speculation – much like the more familiar future-oriented forms of speculation – that is a rather undertheorised practice. With this in mind, in the final section, I undertake some retrocasting of my own, one informed at once by an analysis of a colonial and exploitative monetary encounter and by speculative philosophy. The latter has put the creative potential of acts of speculation to the fore, as a way to explore inventive forms of problem making. In particular, I will examine the potential of seeing monetary objects, acting through particular settings, as ‘lures for feeling’.