Making Weather: Communication Networks and the Great Storm of 1703

This essay links popular writing about the weather to transformations in communication networks at the turn of the seventeenth century in Britain. It argues for modern weather as a complex phenomenon—a "system"—which is partly meteorological in a strict sense, and partly the artifact of media forms like the letter or the newspaper. This article takes as its example the Great Storm of 1703, which closely followed innovations in the British newspaper trade. It makes a further argument for the close linkages between modern forms of populist rhetoric and community building which follow disasters, noting that the media forms associated with nationalism and community building are similar to the communication systems required for witnessing large-scale weather patterns.