There are plenty of history books that feature maps, often many of them, but which deploy them in a way that makes them strictly subordinate to the main text – so I'll restrict myself specifically to historical atlases which use maps to convey information in place of text, rather than as a supplement to it.

My current favourite is definitely David Eltis and David Richardson's fabulous Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, which uses a vast dataset comprising the details of every known slave trading voyage between 1501 and 1867 to illustrate how the slave trade worked – the atlas makes very effective use of tools such as lines of varying thickness to illustrate the numbers of enslaved people being transported from various starting points to various destinations, so it's immediately obvious, for example, that the Anglophone world's main slave narratives, which focus on slavery in the Caribbean and North America, vastly understate the significance of the slave trade being run to South America. The book has useful supplementary text and is absolutely beautifully produced as well – get the hardback edition if you can.

Another invaluable resource, while extremely dense and sadly fragile in its paperback form, that I often recommend to students is the two-volume Penguin Atlas of World History. This scores highly for covering the whole of history (the dividing line between volumes 1 and 2 is the French Revolution) and the whole of the world. The format offers a page of maps placed against a page of (small-type) explanatory text that offers an overview, no more, of broad sweeps of various places, themes and trends. It would be great is this was available in a larger, easier to hold open format that a trade paperback, but it's not – for that you need the completely gorgeous, but pricey and rather less comprehensive, Times Complete History of the World. Nonetheless, the Penguin atlas was a great inspiration for me as a kid, and I've always found it great for introducing students to the links between places as well as developments in given areas over time. The most recent edition was published in 2004.

Finally, another, older, favourite which does much the same sort of thing for the Anglo-Saxon world is David Hill's An Atlas of Anglo-Saxon England, which is brilliant at marrying information from written sources with the results of archaeological fieldwork. Because the archaeology of Anglo-Saxon England is a vibrant field, it's a real shame the atlas hasn't been updated since its original publication in the 1980s, but I still use my copy regularly, four decades after I purchased it.

I am sure there are many similar sorts of titles focused on other times and places, but the general approach of these four strikes me as a good match to your request.

I would add, however, that if you are seriously interested in maps and history, it's a good idea to be aware of how maps – which seems to be objective and independent sources of information – are in reality easy to manipulate, and are very often used for political purposes. Monmonier's classic book How to Lie With Maps is recommended reading in this respect.