Kropotkin was interested in Swiss watchmakers because he saw them as a real-world example of decentralized cooperation and worker self-organization.

In his travels and observations in Switzerland, particularly in the Jura region, he encountered communities of watchmakers who worked in relatively small, independent workshops rather than under a single centralized factory system. He was struck by several things:

• Skilled workers controlled their own work. Many watchmakers were independent artisans or members of small cooperatives.
• Production was decentralized. Different specialists could make different components, which were then assembled into watches through networks of cooperation.
• Workers organized themselves. Kropotkin observed mutual-aid societies, cooperatives, and other forms of voluntary association.
• The system was highly productive without requiring rigid central control. This challenged the idea that complex economic production necessarily required hierarchical management.

This became important to Kropotkin's developing theory of anarchist communism. In The Conquest of Bread and especially Mutual Aid, he used examples from Switzerland and elsewhere to argue that cooperation is not merely an idealistic alternative to competition: people can spontaneously coordinate sophisticated activities through voluntary associations.

The Jura watchmakers were therefore useful to him as a kind of living demonstration of his political argument: a complex industry could function through networks of skilled, relatively autonomous people rather than through a factory owner giving orders from the top.

There is also a fascinating connection to his earlier scientific interests: Kropotkin was interested in how complex systems can emerge from the interaction of relatively independent parts. The watchmaking industry gave him a concrete social example of that principle.