Gesellschaft und Wirtschaft: Bildstatistisches Elementarwerk - Indien und der ferne Osten: Bevölkerung : Um Chr. Geburt-1500-1930 [14080.014]
The pattern
This still is filed under Data as proof.
Define
A chart, map, or count that is the argument, not an illustration next to the argument.
Mechanism
Sighted evidence. The reader is asked to believe their eyes: a bar, a share, a spread on a map.
Verdict
The claim is comparative or quantitative and the figure can be read without a caption doing the sell.
Why it works
Three panels at identical scale turn a fifteen-hundred-year series into a single visual sentence, and because the first panel is deliberately sparse the third reads as saturation rather than as a larger number. The figures are placed on the political territory they belong to, so demographic weight and geography are encoded in one mark instead of a chart plus a map. Two colours separate the two great population blocs without any legend, which lets the reader see the China and India split before reading a word. Dense typographic labelling inside the map does the naming work so the pictograms never have to carry text.
Steal this when
Steal this when a long time span has a flat stretch followed by a break, because starting from a near-empty frame is what makes the final panel land. It also fits any case where the reader needs to know where the mass sits, not just how big it got.