What is the meaning of "the case" in the below sentence? What is the meaning of "the case" in the below sentence? For industry to take off, there needs to be the technology and power to drive factories, large urban populations to provide cheap labor, easy transport to move goods around, an affluent middle-class willing to buy mas-produced objects, a market-driven economy and a political system that allows this to happen. While this was the case for England, other nations, such as Japan, the Netherlands and France met some of these criteria but were not industrializing.