Gevrey series are ubiquitous in analysis; any series satisfying some (possibly non-linear) analytic differential equation is Gevrey of some rational order. The present work stems from two observations: 1) the classical Gevrey series, e.g. generalized hypergeometric series with rational parameters, enjoy arithmetic counterparts of the Archimedean Gevrey condition; 2) the differential operators which occur in classical treatises on special functions have a rather simple structure: they are either Fuchsian, or have only two singularities, 0 and infinity, one of them regular, the other irregular with a single slope... The main idea of the paper is that the arithmetic property 1) accounts for the global analytic property 2): the existence of an injective arithmetic Gevrey solution at one point determines to a large extent the global behaviour of a differential operator with polynomial coefficients. Proofs use both p-adic and complex analysis, and a detailed arithmetic study of the Laplace transform.