In 1956, 48 years after Hausdorff provided a comprehensive account on ordered sets and defined the notion of a scattered order, Erdős and Rado founded the partition calculus in a seminal paper. The present paper gives an account of investigations into generalisations of scattered linear orders and their partition relations for both singletons and pairs. We consider analogues for these order-types of known partition theorems for ordinals or scattered orders and prove a partition theorem from assumptions about cardinal characteristics. Together, this continues older research by Erdős, Galvin, Hajnal, Larson and Takahashi and more recent investigations by Abraham, Bonnet, Cummings, Džamonja, Komjáth, Shelah and Thompson.