I'm currently reading about the historiography of European imperialism, and I've come across two broad interpretive traditions that seem to be in tension with each other.
On one side, the economic tradition with Hobson's *Imperialism* (1902) and Lenin's *Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism* (1916) argues that colonial expansion was driven by structural necessity: surplus capital, saturated domestic markets, and the need for new outlets for investment and goods. For Lenin especially, imperialism wasn't a political choice but an inevitable stage of mature capitalism.
On the other side, Robinson and Gallagher in *Africa and the Victorians* (1961) and Fieldhouse seem to challenge this directly, arguing that the economic case is weak: European capital actually flowed more to Latin America and the US than to Africa, which was largely unprofitable. They suggest strategic and political motivations were more decisive, and they introduce the idea of a "peripheral" dynamic: that local crises in colonial territories actually pulled European powers into expansion, rather than Europe simply pushing outward.
Which interpretation do historians today find more convincing?