I was given this question to write 8 pages about at the end of last week. It's due in two weeks, and I haven't been able to generate any good sources in my library and database searches. Usually, I'm decent at finding what I need, but I'm struggling finding the terms to get the systems I have available to me to spit out the kind of results I'm looking for.
Eric Hobsbawm's Age of Empire, as well as the preceding two volumes in his modern history. What sort of class is this? It sounds like a class that's based on Hobsbawm's theories...
Hull, Isabel V. Absolute Destruction; Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005.
Hull puts the focus more on German military culture as being on the the causes of the war and responsible for its intensification. Worth checking out if your library has it available.
Not sure if this qualifies as "scholarly," but given the topic, why not go to the grand-daddy of it all?
Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism --Vladimir Lenin
And just for laughs, check this out too:
Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy --Murray Rothbard
Might not be helpful in writing your paper, but reading this was a jaw-dropping experience for me. I had to completely rearrange and re-orient the mental picture I had of how the different ideologies fit in the ideological spectrum.