Abstract: Futures and Ruins investigates the formation of the eighteenth-century cult of ruins in an age of risk. Focusing on the production of Hubert Robert (1733-1808) in Paris, my study examines the ruin aesthetic as an expression of a new consciousness of time, one shaped by the contingencies and uncertainties that accompanied the modernization of financial markets. Ruins were associated in late eighteenth-century imaginations with the vicissitudes of fortune and the indeterminacy of the future, at a time of acclimation to the credit economy. As figurehead of ruinisme, and a favored artist of an enterprising elite, Hubert Robert presents a revealing case study of the intersections between aesthetics and finance. Though the vast oeuvre of 'Robert des Ruines'---which encompassed landscapes in two and three dimensions, as well as architectural designs for the new Musée du Louvre---has been neglected, ruins were central to the cultural and monetary life of the capital. Extending the assertion of intellectual historians that the eighteenth century inaugurated a modern conception of the future as distinct from the past and present, my project identifies in the vogue for ruins the sublimation of marketplace anxieties. As exemplified in the artificially crumbling structures that Robert and other artists designed for picturesque gardens, ruins promoted a playful assimilation of precariousness---a pleasure in unpredictable returns, so to speak---that effectively socialized spectators to unregulable 'Fortuna.' Bringing the exigencies of the new economy to bear on Robert's production, I devote special attention to the painter's 'contemporary urban ruins,' canvases featuring the fires and demolitions that transformed the French capital. Robert captured the city's ruins at a time when speculating developers---among them his own patrons---capitalized on decay as an opportunity to rebuild at a profit. Expressions of Robert's proximity to the epicenter of risk, these paintings may be interpreted as sublime meditations on pre-Revolutionary capitalism.