Few countries have failed as spectacularly, or as tragically, as Zimbabwe has over the past half decade. Zimbabwe has transformed from one of Africa’s rare success stories into one of its worst economic and humanitarian disasters. But while culpability for Zimbabwe’s collapse is broadly attributed to the policies of President Robert Mugabe, the intricacies of the country’s unraveling remain poorly appreciated - above all, the importance of property rights in the process. That is unfortunate, because the destruction of Zimbabwe, like that of Nicaragua two decades earlier, offers important, cautionary lessons for other developing countries - as grim natural experiments in the hidden architecture of capitalism.