The Imjin War (1592–8), precipitated by Japan’s invasion of the Korean peninsula, was the largest armed conflict in the world in the later sixteenth century and saw the mobilisation of vast human, natural and commodity resources. Yet despite its dwarfing contemporary conflicts in scale, there has been little attention paid to the war’s impact on the technological priorities of the three combatant East Asian states, as well as its influence on resource allocation, the circulation of knowledge and the formation of collective memory. Moreover, the conflict’s reverberating impact on Iberian actors in East Asia and on European perceptions of East Asia has only been given scant attention. This special section puts into conversation diverse – yet intersecting – fields through a consciously eclectic lineup of scholars to explore the material construction and deconstruction of memory, the emergence of new lifeways and pathways of knowledge circulation, and the personal and political responses to violence and the prospect of further conflict within and well beyond East Asia. Collectively, these articles map an atypical geography, tracing the reverberations of the conflict beyond the combatant countries and into the Hispanic Caribbean and beyond.