Knight’s major publications include: Slave Society in Cuba during the Nineteenth Century (Wisconsin, 1970); The African Dimension of Latin American Societies (Macmillan, 1974); The Caribbean: The Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism (Oxford, 1978; 2nd Edition, revised 1990); Africa and the Caribbean: Legacies of a Link co-edited with Margaret Crahan (Johns Hopkins, 1979); The Modern Caribbean co-edited with Colin A. Palmer (Chapel Hill, 1989); Atlantic Port Cities: Economy, Culture and Society in the Atlantic World, 1650-1850 co-edited with Peggy K. Liss (Tennessee, 1991), UNESCO General History of the Caribbean, volume III: The Slave Societies of the Caribbean (London and Basingstoke: UNESCO Publishing/Macmillan Educational Publishing, 1997), and edited a new translation of Bartolomé de Las Casas, An Introduction, Much Abbreviated, of the Destruction of the Indies (Hackett, 2003) as well as with Teresita Martinez Vergne, Contemporary Caribbean Cultures and Societies in a Global Context, (Chapel Hill, 2005). He was co-translator of Sugar and Railroads, A Cuban History, 1837-1959 by Oscar Zanetti and Alejandro García (Chapel Hill, 1998). In addition, he has published more than 82 articles, chapters, and forewords, as well as more than 140 book reviews in professional journals.

Between 1974 and 1982, Knight co-edited the Johns Hopkins University Press series of studies in Atlantic History and Culture; and between 1975 and 1986 he edited the Caribbean section of the Handbook of Latin American Studies published by the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress.