Colpitts, G. (2012). Provisioning the HBC: Market Economies in the British Buffalo Commons in the Early Nineteenth Century. Western Historical Quarterly
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ECON 321 SPRING 2020 – INDIVIDUAL ASSIGNMENT 2 TO BE SUBMITTED VIA COURSESPACES BY 11:59 PM ON JANUARY 28th, 2020
Name (First, Family) Last 3 digits of Student ID#
TO SPEED UP MARKING, PLEASE ANSWER THE QUESTIONS IN THE FORMS AND SPACES PROVIDED. THE T.A. RESERVES THE RIGHT TO NOT MARK ANY QUESTIONS THAT ARE NOT ANSWERED IN THE EXPECTED LOCATIONS. By submitting this assignment you agree to the following honor code, and understand that any violation of the honor code may lead to penalties including but not limited to a non-negotiable mark of zero on the assignment: Honor Code: I guarantee that all the answers in this assignment are my own work. I have cited any outside sources that I used to create these answers in correct APA style.
Marking scheme – Make sure you answer all the questions before handing this in!
Question Marks
1 a 12
2
a 2
b 2
c 2
d 2
3 a 4
Total 24
Specific instructions, tips and tricks for answering questions are found at the end of this assignment. You are responsible for reading them.
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QUESTIONS 1. Read the following journal article: Colpitts, G. (2012). Provisioning the HBC: Market Economies in the British Buffalo Commons in the Early Nineteenth Century. Western Historical Quarterly, 43(2), pp. 179-203. Retrieved from https://www-jstor-org.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/stable/westhistquar.43.2.0179 The link above will allow free access to the article even if you are off-campus - simply log in to UVic when prompted to. a. (12 marks) Write a 3-2-1 report using the form provided on the ECON 321 Coursespaces page. 2. Use the following article from the textbook to answer the questions below:
II.8 The Founding of Edmonton (1921), pp. 93 – 104. a. (2 marks) According to the article, who supplied food to Edmonton in its days as a fort and trading post? (In terms of the article, before ‘THE SETTLEMENT OF EDMONTON CITY’ on p. 102.) You should name at least two groups in your answer. Which group(s) supplied food to Edmonton in its early days?:
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b. (2 marks) According to the article, what types of food did those groups provide? Type(s) of food:
c. (2 marks) According to the article, who supplied food to the city of Edmonton in its early years as a city? (In terms of the article, after ‘THE SETTLEMENT OF EDMONTON CITY’ on p. 102.) Who supplied food in Edmonton’s early years as a city?
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d. (2 marks) The article concludes by stating that “[s]ince 1905 the vocation of the pioneer has given place to that of […] modern finance”. This statement also applies to Edmonton’s food sources – by 1905, the food providers of pioneer days (which you listed in part a.) had vanished or fallen in relative importance. Based on your reading of the article, name one reasons this change might have happened. There is more than one possible ‘right answer’ to this question, and you will (probably) not find any single sentence in the article that will spell it out for you. Reason:
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3. (4 marks) [T/F/Both and Why] The Hudson’s Bay Company’s monopoly on the fur trade raised the price of fur and lowered its quantity, so in 1821 the British government forced it to split into two companies: the Bay and the North West Company. You may wish to wait until after Lecture 5, on Tuesday January 20th, to answer this question. True, False or Both? ________ Why?:
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Instructions, tips and tricks for answering the assignment questions Question 1: A few guidelines and tips for submitting 3-2-1 reports in this course:
At least 50% (and ideally, almost 100%) of the text in each entry needs to be in your own words, not quoted. If you find yourself counting words to see whether you qualify, then you probably have too much quoted material. Answers with too much quoted material will be given a mark of zero.1
Any material you do quote needs to be cited in APA format. There’s a link on the ECON 321 Coursespaces page to UVic’s APA guide. If that’s not enough, you can also ask a librarian at McPherson library for help, or Google ‘How to cite X in APA’, where X is the type of material you’re quoting (interview, journal article, etc.).2
The ‘three main points’ part of the report can be a bit subjective, but as a general rule, if your points don’t include what the authors of the paper think is the main point of the paper, you should probably think about re-writing your answer and/or re-reading the paper. This is especially true if you’re not sure what the authors think the main point of the paper is.
For the ‘two things you didn’t understand, and how you fixed that’ section, we need to see both what you found out, and the source you used to find that out, properly cited in APA format.
The paper you are asked to read for the assignment CANNOT be used as the source: it’s understood that you will make sure to understand everything within the article you are asked to read, by consulting the article itself. This part of the 3-2-1 report is meant to encourage you to consult outside sources to find things out that you CANNOT find out from the article itself.
Also, remember to include a summary, in your own words, of what you found. It’s not enough to say, ‘I didn’t know what a raccoon was, so I looked it up on Wikipedia.’3 You need to tell us what you discovered about raccoons, in your own words, and you need to cite the source you looked the information up on.
1 Why this rule? Because it’s too easy to quote appropriate material without actually understanding any of it (say, by using your knowledge of English essay writing guidelines to quote the topic sentences that are given the most emphasis). I want to make sure that, as part of this course, you gain practical experience in reading and ‘digesting’ peer-reviewed journal articles, and in filling in gaps you’ve detected in your knowledge of a topic. 2 Why this rule about citing things? Partly because credit should be given for someone else’s words and work, and partly because proper citations are very useful for people who read your work. They allow your readers to track down your sources, which allows them to check your facts and reasoning, and may lead to further sources. Much of the material in this course was found by following citations which led to more citations which led to… etc. 3 While I would prefer that you use sources that, unlike Wikipedia, aren’t subject to constant editing and change, it’s fine to use Wikipedia or other such sources as long as you also include the date and time of access, so that readers can look up the state of the page as it was when you looked at it. (So, you’d add to the standard ‘Retrieved from’ part, ‘on January 3, 2020 at 11:59 AM’.)
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For the ‘main economic point’ of the article, I want you to think in terms of resource allocation, scarcity, tradeoffs, opportunity costs, etc. If your ‘main economic point’ has the word ‘economic’ or ‘economy’ in it, then you probably haven’t gone far enough and are unlikely to get full (or any) marks. If someone asks you, ‘What’s happiness?’ and you answer with, ‘It’s when you’re happy,’ that’s not a very satisfying answer. Similarly, if someone asks ‘What’s the economic point of this paper on the cod fishery?’, if you answer, ‘Cod was important for the development of Newfoundland’s economy’, that’s not very informative. The point of this question is to get you in the habit of thinking like an economist: what’s the scarce resource? What are the needs and wants that this resource can be used to satisfy? How was the resource used? Why that way, instead of all the other ways it could have been used? Those are the kinds of questions your answer should be a reply to.
Depending on the paper, the main economic point may be different – sometimes, very different – than what the authors of the article thought was the main point of the article. Not all the articles we read will be written by economists, and even among those that are, there may be papers where the basic economics aren’t the main point (for example, consider an econometric paper where the authors are showing off a new econometric technique by applying it to historical data – they’d say the main point is the novel mathematical technique, but as students of economic history we’d be more interested in the results of the analysis, and what it says about the economic history of the period under consideration).
Question 2: No additional instructions. Question 3: How to answer True/False/Both and Why Questions We’ll be seeing a lot of them in this course, especially on the midterm and final, so here’s what’s expected. Each T/F/Both and Why question is worth 4 marks. Only ONE of those marks is for the 'true', ‘false’ or 'both'; the rest are for the 'why'. (A statement is ‘both’, if it is partly true and partly false. For example: “Humans typically have two arms and five legs.”) You will receive no marks if your explanation just repeats what is stated in the question, and you will only receive marks for answers that make use of ECON 321 material. It's okay for your explanations to be very short - please try to keep them within the space provided. What this means: If the question is 'T/F/Both: A pie is the same thing as a cake.', then you will NOT get marks (except the 1 mark for the T/F/Both) for answering, 'F. A pie is NOT the same thing as a cake.'. For full marks, you need to provide information that is not in the question and shows you understand the concepts involved. For example, 'F. Unlike a cake, a pie must have a crust and a filling.'.
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"You will only receive marks for answers that make use of ECON 321 material." Since this happens every year, in every course with written answers, I felt I needed to point it out. You are being graded on your understanding and knowledge of ECON 321 material. If you answer a question without using any specific ECON 321 examples, even if your answer is correct, I can't give you full marks for it, because you did not demonstrate an understanding of and familiarity with the course material. Material may be taken from lectures, assignment readings or required readings. Example: "T/F/Both Chinese immigrants to Victoria faced no restrictions on the types of jobs they could take." If you answer, "F. There were many jobs only 'white' people could take.", I can only give you two marks. One for T/F/Both, and one because the explanation given is one covered in 321, but very vague. For full marks, you should give a more specific answer along the lines of, 'F. Chinese immigrants were not allowed to vote. If you couldn't vote, you couldn't work as a prescribing doctor or lawyer.' (This is not the only right answer in this case, but it is AN answer that would get full marks.) If the question contains more than one false statement, you must point out all false statements for full marks. e.g. If the question is “T/F/Both and Why: Pigs have wings and live in the clouds,” for full marks you must point out both that pigs don’t have wings, and that they don’t live in clouds. If a statement is true, you should explain WHY it's true, or in what way it's true. For example, suppose the question is 'T/F/Both and Why: Most cookies are sweet.' You could answer, 'T. Most cookies have cane sugar as a major ingredient, and cane sugar is sweet. Therefore, most cookies are sweet.'
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