The Safavid Empire started to become weak at the end of the 17th century. The authority of the government became weak, and some Kurdish tribes were able to take power for themselves. Attacks from Afghans started in 1709. At the time of these attacks, Kurdish tribes were able to take control of some lands from the Safavid government. In 1719, Kurds took control of Hamadan and the tribes were able to move almost to Isfahan. The Russian Empire and the Ottoman Empire both took control of lands in the north and west of Iran. The Russian Empire's armies took control of Derbent and Baku in the years 1722 and 1723. They were also able to move to Rasht. The Safavid dynasty's downfall was in 1735. Nader Shah, the first "shah" of the Afsharid dynasty, went to try to stop a rebellion among the Kurds in 1747. (He was assassinated on his way.)
From the 1790s, Ardalan rulers ("wali"s) were an important part of the political support for the Qajar dynasty. The Qajar dynasty started to come to power in Iran in the 1790s. The Qajar rulers took hostages from the tribes to keep the Kurdish rulers' loyalty. The Qajar Empire continued to lose lands to the Russian Empire and the Ottoman Empire. Both of these empires wanted to control Kurdistan and Azerbaijan. The Qajar Empire lost most of the land to the north of the Aras () river before 1800.
During the 18th century, the Kurdish emirate of Baban came into power in the Shahrizor area. Its capital city was Sulaymaniyah. In 1821, the emir of Baban defected from the Ottoman Empire to the Qajar Empire. The emir started to help Abbas Mirza, the crown prince of Iran and the Qajar governor of Azerbaijan. The emir's defection caused a war to start between the Ottomans and the Qajars (the 1821–1823 Ottoman–Persian War).
During the early modern period, the importance of the Baban emirate in the later 18th century was one of the reasons for the growth of the Sorani Kurdish dialect. From Amadiya's emirate came poetry in the Kurmanji Kurdish dialect. The rulers of the Ardalan emirate were patrons of poetry in the Gorani Kurdish dialect.
Working with the Kurds in Anatolia, Kurds in Syria came to control most of the trade in livestock and in the galls of oak trees across the region. (The oak galls traded at Aleppo and were exports to Europe for making into ink. The livestock they sold for meat.) In the cities of the region, Kurdish lords and landlords became powerful leaders with authority over the Kurdish people who lived in and came to the city.
In the past, people feared the Kurds. In the Middle Ages, people thought of the Kurds as being bandits. In the 18th century, people in Aleppo and Mosul would say that Kurds were as dangerous as rats and locusts. People in Aleppo would also say the Kurds were like the Bedouin (a group of nomadic people). They would say: "Four were born to do mischief: rats, locusts, Bedouin and Kurds". Because of this, and because many Kurds were in military units, Kurds often lived outside the defensive walls of big cities like Aleppo and Damascus. Many of the veterans of Ottoman governors' private armies who became bandits were Arabs and Turkomans as well as Kurds, but Kurds were the group most connected with the problem. People in northern Syria and Mesopotamia thought of themselves as different from the Kurds, who did not have a good reputation. These differences were in existence into the 21st century.
In the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire and the Qajar Empire both started reforms. The reforms' purpose was to modernize each empire, because both had started to have less power than the Great Powers of the Western world. The reforms meant that the governments took away the autonomy of the Kurdish rulers and the existence of the Kurdish emirates ended. Muslims, including Kurds, feared the successes of the Western powers, and feared the power that Christian empires had. The Tanzimat reforms were part of a new, secular nationalism, in the Ottoman Empire, and this made many traditional Muslim Kurds unhappy. Nationalism among the Ottoman Empire's Christian Armenian people also caused unhappiness to grow among the Kurds. The power of Sufism grew among the Kurds. As a result of the reforms, a social class of Kurdish intellectuals and professionals came into existence with the development of Western education. Many of this new class were descendants of the families that had been the rulers of emirates. Many of these Kurds joined the new institutions of the Ottoman state, including the army. For these Kurds, there was some cultural assimilation with the other people who formed the empire's government social class. Among these Kurds too was also the start of Kurdish political nationalism.
In the Qajar Empire, this reform process was not as fast as it was in the Ottoman Empire. The Qajar Empire got help from Europe to make military reforms in the Qajar army. In 1812, the Qajar Empire tried to take back lands from the Russian Empire when the armies of Napoleon's First French Empire were attacking Russia. The British Empire helped the Qajar Empire with its reforms in the early the 19th century because the Russian Empire's growth was a threat to the British Empire's control of India. In 1828 (after the Russo-Persian War), the Russian Empire took control of all the lands and all the Kurdish tribes to the north of the Aras river. This was the agreement of the Treaty of Turkmenchay. The influence of the Russian Empire was growing in the north of Kurdistan, and the influence of the British Empire was growing in the south of Kurdistan. Many of the Kurdish rulers on the border between the Ottoman Empire and the Qajar Empire chose to work with the Ottoman Empire. This was because the most of the Kurds in the north of Kurdistan were part of Sunni Islam, like the Ottoman dynasty's sultan (and caliph) in Constantinople. (Other Kurds in the south of Kurdistan were part of Shia Islam, like the shah in Tehran.) The Kurdish rulers thought that the Ottoman government would not be as able to tax or conscript their tribes, because the Qajar government in Tehran was nearer than the Ottoman government in Constantinople. Both governments helped rebels who had fought against the other government. For the governments of both empires, controlling the Kurdish lands on the border with their armies was was not possible.
The provinces and government of the Ottoman Empire started to have a different organization because of the reforms that Sultan Mahmud II started. His government named new governors for the provinces, and took away the authority of the Kurdish emirs and governors. There was a lot of fighting against this and the Ottoman army started to attack the Kurdish emirs. In the Qajar Empire, the existence of the Kurdish emirates in Khorasan ended in the first half of the 19th century. The Ardalan clan continued to control Sanandaj until the 1860s. At that time, the Qajar government ended the clan's inherited position as governor.