5 Thalers / Birr

The Bank of Abyssinia was not an Ethiopian institution in any meaningful sense at founding — it was established in 1905 as a concession granted to the National Bank of Egypt, itself controlled by British interests. Emperor Menelik II signed the charter, but effective ownership and management sat firmly outside Addis Ababa for the bank's entire existence. Ethiopian nationalists resented it from the start, and Haile Selassie moved to replace it with the state-owned Bank of Ethiopia in 1931, ending the concession arrangement entirely.

Bradbury Wilkinson produced the plates in London. The dual denomination — Thalers and Birr on the same note — reflects the transitional monetary vocabulary of the period, with the Maria Theresa Thaler still functioning as a parallel trade currency across the Horn of Africa well into the twentieth century.