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Luis Inácio Lula Da Silva, originally a metalworker and trade union activist, was president of Brazil from 2003 to 2010, leading the largest country of Latin America, with more than 212 million people. In 2020, social and labour historian John D. French, with a long career devoted to Brazilian labour history, published the much acclaimed biography Lula and His Politics of Cunning: From Metalworker to President of Brazil. In this book, French explicitly aims to give a bottom-up account of Lula’s life. Various reviews and discussions of French’s Lula biography have already been published, and therefore the Editorial Committee of the International Review of Social History decided to organize a broader debate, to discuss the interplay between the biographical genre and recent trends in social history, and, more in particular, global labour history. In this debate, we have asked John French and a number of colleagues from around the world to discuss the value of the social-biographical perspective for the field of global labour history.