After initially using enslaved workers from local Indian tribes, the French introduced kidnapped and enslaved Africans as a labor force in the Natchez District by 1719. The international slave trade, established in the 17th century, sent trading ships from Europe to Western Africa, where goods were exchanged for captured people who were then transported to the Americas and sold into slavery. Although the French first envisioned a fur-trading economy in the Lower Mississippi River Valley, the newly established French Company of the Indies introduced tobacco as a cash crop in an effort to match British success in Virginia and quickly imported large numbers of African slaves to create a plantation economy. The Natchez Massacre in 1729 ended those ambitions. Only in the late 1700s, after limited growth under British and Spanish rule, did a plantation economy based on slavery begin to emerge, and after Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin in 1795, the Natchez District quickly became a center of the tragic system of American chattel slavery.